Burial Ground for Children, Cloonselherny, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground for Children, Cloonselherny, Co. Clare

In a field of improved pasture in County Clare, on the level crest of a low ridge running north to south, there is a burial ground that cannot be seen.

No headstones break the surface, no enclosure wall announces itself, and the field boundaries that once framed the site to the south have long since been removed. What remains, for those who know to look, is the faint outline of a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure common across Ireland, whose traces alone define where the ground holds its dead.

The site is recorded on both the 1842 and 1915 editions of the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, where it is named plainly as a burial ground for children. These were places known in Irish tradition as cillíní, used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. The fact that this particular site sits within the remnants of a rath is telling. Raths were Iron Age or early medieval farmstead enclosures, and their earthworks were frequently reused in later centuries as liminal burial spaces, places that existed at the edge of the sanctioned religious landscape. The rath that defines this site, catalogued separately as CL007-008002, is itself barely visible, its form now detectable mainly through survey rather than direct observation.

What is quietly remarkable here is the layering: a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure, repurposed across centuries as a place of quiet, unofficial grief, recorded twice by nineteenth and early twentieth century mapmakers who simply named it for what it was, and now surviving only as an absence in the grass.

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