Children's burial ground, Cloonrane, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloonrane, Co. Galway

In a field in Cloonrane, on gently undulating grassland with bogland stretching away to the south, a slightly raised patch of ground marks a place where unbaptised children were once quietly buried, apart from consecrated ground and apart from the formal rituals of the Church.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, are scattered across the Irish landscape in their hundreds, occupying marginal spaces, field corners, and old boundaries. They reflect a long period in Irish Catholic practice when infants who died before baptism were considered ineligible for Christian burial, and so their families found other ways to give them a resting place.

The Cloonrane example is a subrectangular raised area measuring roughly eighteen metres east to west and fifteen metres north to south. A low earthen bank defines its northern edge, while the remaining sides are marked by a degraded scarp, the kind of slight drop in the ground that is easy to miss unless you know to look for it. Inside, a number of irregular limestone slabs lie in the ground, marking graves oriented east to west in the traditional Christian manner, the bodies laid out facing the rising sun. The site is modest in scale and unannounced by any signage or formal enclosure, which is typical of cillíní across Ireland. They were never meant to be conspicuous.

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