Children's burial ground, Ballydavid, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballydavid, Co. Galway

Just east of a ruined church in Ballydavid, County Galway, a rectangular patch of ground holds a particular kind of quiet.

Small stones, set into the earth in what appear to be parallel rows running north to south, mark the graves of unbaptised children. These are the traces of a cillín, the Irish tradition of burying infants who died before baptism in unconsecrated ground adjacent to, but deliberately separate from, formal parish cemeteries. The rows suggest a degree of care in how the burials were laid out, though a number of the marker stones have since been uprooted and now lie loose on the surface, displaced by time or disturbance.

The site is recorded on the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a clearly defined rectangle measuring roughly twenty metres north to south and fifteen metres east to west. It sits immediately to the east of the east gable of the adjoining church, with a field boundary forming its eastern limit. The association of the cillín with the church structure is typical of these sites across Ireland, where the proximity to consecrated ground offered a kind of compromise between exclusion and belonging. A large sycamore tree now grows at the centre of the burial ground, its roots long since woven through whatever lies beneath.

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