Children's burial ground, Clonlonan, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Clonlonan, Co. Westmeath

In a pasture field in County Westmeath, an oval shadow in the grass is almost the only thing left to mark a place where unbaptised infants were once quietly buried.

The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, and the hollow that once defined it has been almost entirely filled in over time. What remains visible, and only from aerial photography, is a dark green cropmark roughly 53 metres by 43 metres in extent, its shape suggesting a slight depression in the ground that the overlying grass still registers in its own way.

This was a cillín, a type of informal burial ground used across Ireland for centuries to inter those who, by the conventions of Catholic doctrine, could not be buried in consecrated ground. Unbaptised infants were the most common occupants of such places, and families would typically use a site at the margins of settled land, a field hollow, a boundary edge, or ground close to some older, pre-Christian feature. Here, a bullaun stone sits roughly 22 metres to the south. A bullaun is a large stone with one or more cup-shaped hollows worn or carved into its surface, and such stones are frequently found near early ecclesiastical sites or places with a long history of local ritual significance. A rock-filled depression just north of the bullaun stone may be the remnant of the original hollow described in local accounts of the site. The proximity of these two features, the informal burial ground and the ancient marked stone, points to a layering of use that is common in the Irish landscape, where a place held in local memory often turns out to have been meaningful across several different periods.

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