Children's burial ground, Bunanraun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Bunanraun, Co. Galway

Inside a ringfort on the Bunanraun landscape in County Galway, set within a slight hollow, lies a small and quietly unsettling patch of ground where unbaptised children were once buried.

These burial places, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, were used for infants who died before baptism and were therefore excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic doctrine. They appear across Ireland in liminal spaces, old ruins, boundaries, and prehistoric enclosures, places already set apart from the ordinary world. The choice of a ringfort, an early medieval circular earthwork enclosure originally built as a farmstead or defended homestead, would not have been accidental. Such places carried a sense of antiquity and separation that made them suitable, in the folk imagination, for those who could not be buried in the parish churchyard.

The burial ground itself is a raised rectangular area measuring roughly fifteen metres north to south and seven metres east to west, partially overgrown and without any formal enclosure of its own. Within it, a number of stones have been placed at random intervals, each one marking a grave. Close by, in the northern sector of the ringfort, a single long rectangular stone lies on the ground, measuring just over two metres in length, forty centimetres wide, and thirty centimetres thick. Whether it was associated with burial practice or belongs to the fabric of the ringfort itself is not recorded. The overall impression is of a place that accumulated its dead quietly, without ceremony, the stones placed by grieving families rather than by any institutional hand.

The site sits within the ringfort rather than beside it, which gives the arrangement an added layer of strangeness. The hollow in which it lies would have made it slightly hidden from the surrounding landscape, a space within a space. The partial overgrowth noted when the site was documented adds to the sense of a place that has been neither maintained nor entirely forgotten.

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