Children's burial ground, An Chloch Bhreac Íochtair, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At An Chloch Bhreac Íochtair in County Galway, a burial ground exists most convincingly on paper and in memory.
It appears by name on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those meticulous nineteenth-century documents that recorded not only roads and field boundaries but the quieter, older layers of the Irish landscape. Local tradition has long identified the spot as a children's burial ground, the term commonly abbreviated to CBG in archaeological records. Yet stand at the location today and there is nothing to see. No mounding, no enclosure, no marker of any kind survives above ground.
The site sits within a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, built from earthen banks or stone and used as a defended homestead by farming families across Ireland. Children's burial grounds, sometimes called cilliní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, who by the conventions of Catholic practice were excluded from consecrated ground. These places were often tucked into already-liminal spaces, old ringforts, the margins of fields, shorelines, and the association of this site with an existing ancient enclosure follows a pattern found widely across the country. The ringfort at this location carries its own separate record, suggesting the burial ground occupied a corner or interior of a structure already centuries old by the time it came into use as a place of quiet, unofficial grief.
What makes the site quietly arresting is precisely its invisibility. The name persisted on official maps and in local knowledge long after any physical trace disappeared, which says something about how communities held onto the memory of where their unbaptised children lay, even when the ground itself had been levelled or absorbed into the surrounding landscape.