Children's burial ground, Annaghmore, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Annaghmore, Co. Galway

In a field northeast of Annagh Lough in County Galway, a shallow circular depression roughly thirty metres across is all that physically remains of a place where children were buried for generations.

There are no headstones, no kerbing, no visible markers of any kind. Periodic ploughing over the years has seen to that. What survives is the faint imprint of the ground itself, a slight hollow in the pasture that could easily be walked past without a second thought.

The site is what is known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a children's burial ground set apart from consecrated ground. Such places were used for unbaptised infants, and sometimes for others considered ineligible for burial in a parish churchyard, including stillborn children and, in earlier centuries, those who died by suicide or were strangers with no known faith. The practice was widespread across Ireland and rooted in the theological position, since softened by the Catholic Church, that the unbaptised could not enter heaven. Families who could not bury their children in hallowed ground brought them instead to ancient, liminal spaces, often ringforts, early medieval enclosures, or simply secluded spots at field boundaries. The circular form of the hollow at Annaghmore is consistent with this pattern. The last recorded burial at this site was that of a child, around 1957, which places the end of its active use well within living memory at the time the site was first formally described.

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