Children's burial ground, Fortyacres, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In a field at Fortyacres in County Galway, there is a burial ground with no headstones, no inscriptions, and no visible trace of the people interred within it.
The ground is level and grass-covered, and only two sides of the original enclosure still stand, defined by a low earthen bank. This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants and others excluded from burial in Catholic churchyards. Such sites are found across Ireland, often at the margins of fields or alongside older monuments, and they carry a particular quietness that comes not from emptiness but from deliberate absence.
The site is recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a rectangular enclosed area, which gives some sense of what it once looked like in its more complete form. Today the northwest and southeast sides survive, measuring roughly 16 metres along the northwest-southeast axis and 13 metres across. The bank on the northwest side runs along the outer edge of what was once a fosse, or ditch, and the whole enclosure sits immediately adjacent to a ringfort to the southwest. That proximity is telling: cillíns in Ireland were frequently placed near prehistoric earthworks, and scholars have suggested various reasons for this, from the perceived antiquity and sanctity of such locations to more practical questions of land use and community memory. References to this particular site appear in Costello's work of 1903 and in O'Flanagan's 1927 survey, suggesting it was already recognised as a place of significance in the early twentieth century, even as its physical fabric was diminishing.
There is nothing to mark the graves from the surface, and that is perhaps the most arresting thing about the place. The enclosure held burials that were, by the conventions of the time, considered to exist outside the formal sacramental record, and the landscape has absorbed them accordingly. The bank and the grass are what remain.