Children's burial ground, Cloondergan, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloondergan, Co. Galway

At Cloondergan in County Galway, a small overgrown enclosure immediately south of an old church contains what local tradition identifies as a children's burial ground, known in Irish as a cillín, a type of informal burial place used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground.

Small stones set into the earth, oriented east to west in the manner of Christian burial, are still visible among the rubble and undergrowth. Yet the ground has not kept its secrets entirely intact; when bulldozing disturbed part of the site in recent years, adult human bones came to light as well, complicating the picture of who exactly was laid here.

The enclosure itself has an interesting cartographic history. On the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the nearby church sits within a small, unnamed, triangular-shaped enclosure. By the time the third edition was surveyed in 1930, that boundary had been redrawn as subcircular and was labelled simply as a grave yard. What survives on the ground today is a subcircular earthen bank, roughly 26.6 metres north to south, originally tree-lined and standing to a maximum height of around 1.1 metres with a width of approximately 2.2 metres. The bank remains largely intact along its southern, western, and northern stretches, though elsewhere it has been reduced to little more than a scarp by the same bulldozing that disturbed the graves. A gap on the western side may represent the original entrance. Whether this encircling bank belongs to the burial ground itself or to an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure associated with the church is an open question that the physical evidence alone cannot resolve.

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