Children's burial ground, Ballymore, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballymore, Co. Westmeath

Just outside the eastern wall of Ballymore graveyard in County Westmeath, a shallow oval depression sits quietly in the ground, easy to miss and difficult to interpret without local knowledge.

Measuring roughly eighteen metres across in one direction and nine in the other, it is believed to be the remains of a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Ireland as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground were interred, often in locations just beyond the boundary of an official churchyard. The placement here is telling: not inside the graveyard wall, but pressed against its outer face, geographically adjacent to but formally excluded from the sacred enclosure within.

The graveyard itself carries several centuries of layered history. A medieval church once occupied the site, and the current Church of Ireland building, dedicated to St Owen, was erected in 1827 directly over its remains. The surrounding stone wall was constructed by the Magan family sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, with an entrance gate to the south. In the eastern quadrant, the ruins of a seventeenth-century mausoleum or mortuary chapel still stand, adding another register of the site's long use as a place where different communities and different traditions of burial coexisted, not always comfortably, within a compact space. The possible cillín outside the eastern wall fits this pattern, occupying the threshold between the formally sanctioned ground and the world beyond it.

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