Kilcooley Grave Yard, Curreentorpan, Co. Roscommon

Roughly thirty centimetres wide and thirty centimetres tall, they are arranged in quiet north-to-south rows, uninscribed and largely anonymous. The ground they occupy was set aside specifically for children, one of many such burial places found across Ireland known as cillíní, where infants and unbaptised children were laid to rest outside the formal rites of the Church. These sites were rarely marked on maps and seldom spoken of openly, and yet they persisted across the countryside for centuries, encoded in the landscape rather than in any official record.

The graveyard sits predominantly to the east and west of an older church, itself a separate structure, within a rectangular grass-covered enclosure measuring roughly 32.5 metres east to west and 22.5 metres north to south. The enclosure is defined by a spread of stone between 2.5 and 3.2 metres wide, with the base of a wall still visible along the northern side at a thickness of 1.2 metres. A single entrance, 1.6 metres wide, opens at the centre of the western side and is marked on its northern edge by a large upright stone measuring 0.6 metres by 0.25 metres and standing 0.7 metres high. To the south of the church, one grave marker stands out from the rest. It is a bullaun stone, a type of ancient stone with one or more rounded depressions worn or carved into its surface, whose origins long predate the graveyard itself. That such a stone was repurposed as a grave marker suggests the site carried layers of significance stretching back well before the Christian period, even if the precise history of that earlier use is now lost.