Children's burial ground, Carrownafreevy, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Carrownafreevy, Co. Galway

On a ridge in Carrownafreevy, within what remains of a small tree copse in north County Galway, there is a place where children were once buried, marked by a quiet line of small limestone grave-markers.

None of those markers survive today, and the ground gives nothing away. The site is one of those places whose significance exists almost entirely in local memory and the written record rather than in anything a visitor could see or touch.

Such sites are known in Ireland as cillíní, or children's burial grounds, and they occupy a particular and sombre corner of Irish social history. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church, were traditionally denied burial in consecrated ground. Instead, they were laid to rest in marginal spaces, old ringforts, the edges of fields, or quiet rises like this one. At Carrownafreevy, local knowledge describes a line of modest limestone markers running across the ridge, a simple and deliberate arrangement that speaks to the care taken even in these unofficial burials. In 1937, land clearance removed whatever physical trace remained above the surface, leaving the ridge indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

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