Children's burial ground, Ballinloughaun, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballinloughaun, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field in Ballinloughaun, on a gentle east-facing slope in County Mayo, a low moss-covered ring of collapsed drystone walling encloses a patch of ground that never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map.

The enclosure, roughly square and measuring about thirteen metres east to west and eleven and a half metres north to south, is strewn with loose stones and shaded by ash trees that have taken root both within and along the crumbled wall itself. Nothing about it announces its purpose to a passing eye.

According to local knowledge, this was a cillín, an informal burial ground for unbaptised infants. The practice of burying unbaptised children outside consecrated ground was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, rooted in the Catholic doctrine of limbo, which held that babies who died before baptism could not enter heaven. Unable to be interred in the parish churchyard, they were laid instead in marginal or ancient places, often ringforts, old enclosures, or lonely field boundaries. The Ballinloughaun enclosure fits that pattern precisely. Its absence from both the 1838 and 1922 six-inch Ordnance Survey maps suggests it was never formally recorded or acknowledged by outside authorities, surviving instead through local memory alone. The wall, built in the drystone tradition without mortar, has long since slumped to a low tumble of stones, with additional field clearance stones heaped over the western and south-western sections, blurring its outline further. The interior is not raised above the surrounding ground level, which makes it easy to overlook entirely.

What survives is less a monument than a trace, the kind of place that persists not through official designation but through the quiet persistence of people who remembered what it was for.

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Pete F
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