Burial ground, Okyle, Co. Waterford

Somewhere in the pasture at Okyle, on a south-facing slope in County Waterford, lies a burial ground that has effectively vanished from the surface of the earth. There is nothing to mark it at ground level, no mound, no stones, no obvious break in the grass. The only record of it appears on the 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is labelled a cillín.

A cillín, pronounced roughly "killeen", was an informal or unconsecrated burial ground, traditionally used in Ireland for those excluded from consecrated churchyard burial, most commonly unbaptised infants. These sites are scattered across the Irish countryside in considerable numbers, many of them now invisible, forgotten, or surviving only as faint earthworks on old maps. The Okyle example is small, measuring approximately fifteen metres on its longer northwest-to-southeast axis and around six metres across. Even that modest outline may not be complete; the northeast end appears to have been cut into or partially removed by a road bank running in the same northwest-to-southeast direction, suggesting that construction work at some point simply overrode whatever remained of the boundary. The map notation gives the site a name and a shape, but no date, no known history of use, and no named community associated with it.