Children's burial ground, Curraghduff Middle, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Curraghduff Middle, Co. Galway

In the state forestry of Curraghduff Middle, on a steep hillslope facing north-east, there is a burial ground that has effectively ceased to exist as anything visible.

No mound, no marker, no enclosing wall. The only evidence that it was ever there is a small circle drawn on a nineteenth-century map, a notation roughly ten metres across, unenclosed, sitting about forty metres east of the townland boundary.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used historically for those denied burial in consecrated church ground, most commonly unbaptised infants. Such sites are found across Ireland, often occupying marginal land, hilltops, or the edges of fields, and they carry a particular kind of quiet weight. The Ordnance Survey's second edition of the six-inch map, published in 1899, recorded this one in Curraghduff Middle, suggesting it was still known and identifiable at the close of the nineteenth century. By the time fieldwork was carried out for the archaeological inventory of west Galway, compiled by Paul Gosling and published in 1993, no surface trace could be found. The forestry had absorbed it, or the ground had simply smoothed over whatever once marked the spot.

What remains, then, is a place defined almost entirely by its absence. The map circle persists in archive; the hillslope persists in the forest. The site itself, if it can still be called that, is somewhere between the two.

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Pete F
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