Children's burial ground, Annaghbeg, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Annaghbeg, Co. Galway

Tucked within the western half of an ancient ringfort at Annaghbeg in County Galway, a small burial ground occupies ground that has been considered sacred across two quite different eras.

The site is a cillin, sometimes called a children's burial ground, one of hundreds of informal graveyards found across Ireland where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated church burial were laid to rest. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is the way the old earthwork and the burial ground have become fused into one place, the raised scarp of the ringfort's bank serving as the western boundary of the burial ground, the prehistoric and the early modern sharing the same soil.

The burial ground is roughly subrectangular in plan, measuring approximately 24 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, and is described as well preserved. No formal enclosing element survives on most sides, which is not unusual for a cillin; many such sites were marked only by tradition and memory rather than built boundaries. The grave-markers here are unworked and uninscribed, simple stones rather than carved slabs, and they are oriented east to west in the conventional Christian manner. Many of them have gathered, over time, around a hawthorn bush at the eastern end of the site. The hawthorn's association with liminal or sacred spaces runs deep in Irish folk belief, and its presence here, with stones clustered at its base, gives the site a particular atmosphere that no inscription could add.

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