Children's burial ground, Cloonascarberry, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloonascarberry, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of Cloonascarberry in County Galway lies a children's burial ground whose precise whereabouts nobody can now say with confidence, not even local people.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground, the logic being that they occupied a kind of spiritual margin, neither fully inside nor outside the community's religious life. What makes this particular example unusually puzzling is that even the physical evidence refuses to resolve itself clearly.

There are, in effect, two candidate features sitting close together in the same field. One is a deep rectangular hollow, roughly 40 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, enclosed along its northern arc by a low earthen bank, with a scatter of haphazardly placed limestone boulders and pebbles inside that may once have served as grave-markers. Immediately to the south-west of this sits a much smaller triangular enclosure, only about 10 metres across, also banked on two sides and likewise strewn with limestone pebbles. The relationship between the two is unresolved. Adding a further layer of uncertainty, an avenue roughly 12 metres wide, defined by two low parallel earthen banks, runs northward from the hollow into the next field. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it either predates systematic recording or was considered too minor to mark, and its connection to whichever of the two enclosures is the actual burial site remains unclear. The archaeology here is less a set of answers than a quiet accumulation of questions set into ordinary-looking ground.

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