Burial ground, Pollacullaire, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At Pollacullaire in County Galway, there is a burial ground that exists more as an absence than a presence.
No stones mark it, no enclosure wall survives, and nothing visible on the ground today would suggest it is there at all. What remains is a name, a community memory, and a broken line on a map.
The site sits within an earthwork, and local knowledge was evidently strong enough that the place was named on early Ordnance Survey maps, even if cartographers initially stopped short of marking its precise location. The first edition of the six-inch OS map recorded the name but left the ground blank. By the third edition, published in 1920, a correction had been made: a small unenclosed rectangular area, roughly ten metres by five metres, was indicated with a broken line, the cartographic shorthand for something imprecisely known rather than confidently surveyed. The classification offered is "possibly a CBG", meaning a children's burial ground, sometimes called a cillín. These were informal, unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants, and occasionally others excluded from church burial rites, were interred, often in marginal places such as old earthworks, ruined enclosures, or townland boundaries. Their locations were passed down through local knowledge rather than official record, which is precisely why this one appeared first as a name without a place.