Children's burial ground, Cloncurry, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloncurry, Co. Kildare

A short distance south of a medieval church at Cloncurry, two small flat stones stand quietly in the earth, easy to miss and almost entirely unmarked. They are rectangular, unworked, and plain, each roughly half a metre tall and forty centimetres across, set upright in line with one another and aligned with the west gable wall of the nearby church. The current thinking is that they function as burial markers, possibly indicating the graves of children.

Sites like this one are more common across Ireland than most people realise. Known variously as killeens or cillíní, children's burial grounds were used for centuries to inter those who had died unbaptised, including infants and stillborn babies, who could not under Catholic teaching be buried in consecrated ground. They were typically established at liminal locations, places that existed at the edge of the official religious landscape: old ruined churches, ancient ringforts, shorelines, or boundaries between townlands. The two markers at Cloncurry sit just four metres from the south-west corner of the associated church, that slight but deliberate distance perhaps reflecting the ambiguous status of those buried there, close to sanctified ground but formally excluded from it. The stones themselves are earthfast flags, meaning they are set directly into the ground rather than mounted on a base or plinth, and their complete lack of carving or inscription is typical of such sites, where formal commemoration was rarely possible or permitted.

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Pete F
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