Burial ground, Killeane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
At Killeane in County Cork, a modern house stands on ground that was once recorded as a children's burial ground.
There is nothing to see there now, no mound, no kerbing, no scatter of small markers, but the place had a name and a designated purpose distinct enough that the Ordnance Survey saw fit to label it on its six-inch map in 1842.
The label the surveyors used, "Children's Burial Ground", almost certainly points to what was once known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a small, unconsecrated plot used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic practice of the period, were excluded from burial in consecrated ground. These sites were typically set apart from parish graveyards, often located at townland boundaries, on marginal land, or near older, pre-Christian monuments. They were quietly maintained by local communities for generations, their existence passed on through memory rather than formal record. By the time the OS teams were mapping the country in the mid-nineteenth century, many such places were already fading from active use, documented in cartographic ink even as the communities that sustained them were being torn apart by famine and emigration. The 1842 map gives Killeane's cillín a fixed point in time, a moment when it was still known and named. What happened to it after that is unrecorded, and at some point a house was built on the site, erasing whatever surface evidence may once have existed.