Burial ground, Drummig, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In the pastureland of Drummig in West Cork, an irregular patch of heavy overgrowth marks a place where children were buried, with no grave markers to indicate who lies there or how many.
These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic canon law, including stillborn children, and sometimes suicides or strangers. They occupy a particular, quiet category of Irish landscape, present in almost every county yet rarely announced, their boundaries often only legible through a change in vegetation or a slight rise in the ground.
The Drummig site was recorded as a children's burial ground on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means it was already recognised as such at a time when the practice of burying unbaptised children in these marginal places was still commonplace. The OS six-inch series, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, remains one of the most detailed records of how the Irish landscape was understood and named at that period, and the fact that cartographers noted this ground specifically suggests it was a known and used site at the time of survey. Beyond that mark on the map, the physical site today offers little in the way of visible evidence; the area is irregular in shape, defined mainly by the density of growth around it, and no grave markers have been recorded.