Burial Ground for Children, Lissofin, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground for Children, Lissofin, Co. Clare

In a field just north of the Ennis to Scarriff road in County Clare, a circle of thorn trees surrounds a patch of ground where no names were ever carved into stone.

The limestone boulders scattered across the interior are uninscribed, the upright grave markers carry no text, and the whole enclosure is quietly receding under moss and ivy. This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants and others, including stillborn children, who were excluded from burial in consecrated Catholic ground. Such places are found across Ireland, often on the margins of townlands or beside older boundaries, and they carry a particular quality of deliberate obscurity, set apart but not forgotten.

The site at Lissofin was already recognised and named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it appears as a circular area labelled 'Burial Ground for Children'. Later OS mapping records it as slightly irregular in plan and gives it the name 'Children's Burial Ground'. The enclosure measures roughly fourteen metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west, defined by a low, eroded scarp that survives best along the south-western to north-eastern arc and has almost entirely worn away on the north-eastern to south-western side. The tallest of the upright markers, still standing at around 0.8 metres, sits off-centre towards the west. Field boundaries that once lay to the east and west of the site, visible on historic mapping, have since been removed, and road widening along the R352 has brought a concrete post fence and low embankment right up against the monument's southern edge.

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