Children's burial ground, Eskerboy, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Eskerboy, Co. Galway

At Eskerboy in County Galway, a small rectangular platform of earth and stone holds the graves of children who never received burial in consecrated ground.

The site measures roughly twelve metres long and five and a half metres wide, and across its surface a number of set stones mark graves oriented east to west, the traditional Christian alignment placing the body to face the rising sun. Modest and poorly preserved, it is the kind of place that could be crossed without a second thought.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants, and occasionally for others excluded from the parish churchyard, such as suicides or strangers. For centuries, Catholic teaching held that unbaptised children could not enter heaven and so could not be buried in blessed earth. Families instead brought their infants to liminal places, often ancient or marginal ground, and Eskerboy is no exception. The burial platform sits within what appears to be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or rectilinear boundary that in Ireland typically marks a monastic or early Christian foundation, sometimes centuries older than any standing remains. A grass-covered stony mound at the northern end of the platform is likely the accumulated spoil of field clearance rather than a deliberate monument, a reminder that agricultural work and memory have long overlapped on this ground. The presence of child burials within such an enclosure follows a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland, where early church sites, already set apart from ordinary land, were quietly repurposed for those the official church would not accommodate.

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