Children's burial ground, Cloonmweelaun, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloonmweelaun, Co. Galway

In the townland of Cloonmweelaun in County Galway, a ringfort encloses a burial ground that has left no mark on the earth whatsoever.

No stones, no mounds, no hollows. The children buried inside it are present only in local memory, and even that record is fading.

The practice of burying unbaptised children, or infants who died before they could be brought into the Church, in marginal or ancient places was once widespread across Ireland. These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, and a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure dating typically from the early medieval period, was a common choice. Such enclosures carried an ambiguous status in the folk imagination, associated with the otherworld and set apart from consecrated ground, which paradoxically made them acceptable places for those whom the Church could not formally receive in burial. At Cloonmweelaun, local knowledge holds that the interior of the rath was used precisely in this way. The last burial there took place approximately a century ago, placing it somewhere around the early decades of the twentieth century, when the cillín tradition was beginning to fade as attitudes toward the burial of unbaptised infants gradually shifted.

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