Children's burial ground, Bilboa, Co. Limerick

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Bilboa, Co. Limerick

A road now cuts straight through what was once a single burial ground on the edge of Bilboa, in County Limerick, splitting it into two halves, only one of which has survived at all.

Known locally as Cooneen graveyard, this is a cillín, the kind of informal burial ground once used across rural Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. What makes this particular site quietly peculiar is that its severed geometry can still be read against the historical maps, and that local memory in 1840 attached it not only to children but to a Church of Ireland clergyman.

When the Ordnance Survey recorded the area in 1840, the site appeared on their six-inch map as a sub-rectangular enclosure of considerable size, roughly 35 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, bisected by a road and labelled simply 'Grave Yard'. The surveyors also noted the oral account attached to it: 'Quoneen is a small burial place for children. It is supposed by the natives to be the place where Dean Story, formerly of Bilboa Court, was interred. It is about one chain in diameter,' which works out to approximately 20 metres. That a children's burial ground should also be remembered as the resting place of a local dean is an unusual pairing, and it is left unresolved in the record. By the time the 1927 six-inch map was produced, only the north-east quadrant of the original enclosure was being shown, and it was described as disused.

Today, the surviving remnant sits in the south-west corner of a pasture field, immediately north of the road that long ago divided the site. What remains is an arc of low earthen bank, roughly 2.4 metres wide and no more than 0.4 metres high on the outer face, enclosing a wedge-shaped area about 23 metres east to west and 14 metres north to south, with a field boundary forming its western edge. There are no visible grave markers of any kind. The portions of the original enclosure that once lay west of the field boundary and south of the road have left no trace on the ground. The site sits on fairly level terrain with open views to the north, west, and east, and is not signposted or formally managed in any way.

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