Children's burial ground, Carrow, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Carrow, Co. Tipperary

On an east-facing slope of upland Tipperary, there is a burial ground that has all but vanished into the field around it.

No headstones survive, no wall, no obvious enclosure; only the Ordnance Survey's older six-inch maps acknowledge the place at all, marking it as a killeen and tracing a rough oval, approximately twenty-five metres north to south and forty metres northeast to southwest, with a dashed line that suggests a boundary nobody can now see on the ground.

A killeen, sometimes also spelled cillin, was an informal burial place used for unbaptised infants, and occasionally for others considered outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. These sites were almost always set apart from consecrated ground, occupying marginal spaces: the edges of fields, old earthworks, or secluded rises. The Carrow killeen may have a considerably older paper trail than its OS marking implies. The Civil Survey, a mid-seventeenth-century land valuation compiled under Cromwellian administration, appears to mention the site under the name "ye heape of stones called Laghtnegarough," a reference recorded by Simington in 1934. A lacht, or leacht, typically denotes a cairn or a commemorative stone heap, sometimes associated with early Christian memorial practice. Several large flagstones are now scattered in a field to the north of the hill, and these may be the dispersed remains of that same heap, broken up at some point and left where they fell.

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Pete F
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