Children's burial ground, Driminidy, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Driminidy, Co. Cork

At a bend in a road in Driminidy, a small rectangle of grass sits on the northern verge, unmarked and easy to pass without a second glance.

It measures roughly ten metres east to west and three metres north to south, and there is nothing on its surface to indicate what lies beneath. No headstones, no crosses, no inscribed names. The ground keeps its own counsel.

Local knowledge identifies this as a children's burial ground, a type of site found in some numbers across rural Ireland. These places, known in Irish as cillíní, were informal burial grounds used for infants who died before baptism, and sometimes for others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under the rules of the Catholic Church. Because unbaptised children were believed to occupy an uncertain spiritual category, neither fully within the Church nor entirely outside it, they could not be interred in parish graveyards. Families buried them instead in marginal spaces, at field boundaries, near ancient earthworks, or, as here, at the edge of a road. The absence of grave-markers at Driminidy is not unusual for such sites; many were never formally demarcated, and whatever physical signs once existed have long since disappeared into the turf.

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Pete F
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