Children's burial ground, Corrabaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Inside a ringfort in Corrabaun, in the north of County Galway, there is a patch of overgrown ground that local tradition has long identified as a children's burial ground.
No enclosing wall marks it out, and there is no formal monument to announce it. What remains are stones: three upright boulders arranged on an east-west alignment that appear to serve as grave-markers, and a scatter of smaller boulders, haphazardly placed across the same ground, that may indicate further burials beneath.
Such sites are known in Irish as cillíní, informal burial grounds used historically for those who could not be interred in consecrated church ground, most commonly unbaptised infants. The choice of a ringfort as the location is not unusual in this context. Ringforts, which are circular enclosures dating from the early medieval period, were already ancient and set apart from everyday use by the time these burials took place, and marginal, liminal spaces of that kind were often selected for cillíní precisely because they existed outside the ordinary boundaries of parish life. The east-west orientation of the three standing boulders echoes the alignment conventional in Christian burial practice, suggesting a community that observed certain forms even while burying its dead outside the church's formal remit.
The site itself remains unenclosed and heavily overgrown, its presence sustained more by local memory than by any visible marker. The smaller boulders scattered around the three upright stones are ambiguous, their arrangement informal enough that only their context, within a space known locally as a burial ground, gives them their probable meaning.