Children's burial ground, Garbally Demesne, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Garbally Demesne, Co. Galway

In a field beside the Ballinasloe to Aughrim road, a slightly raised patch of ground holds a particular kind of silence.

The elevation is barely perceptible, defined by a low scarp on most sides, and what might be grave-markers are nothing more than limestone blocks sitting just above the grass. This is a cillín, an informal burial ground of the sort once used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Such places were typically kept apart from the parish churchyard, occupying marginal land, and the care taken over them varied enormously from place to place and generation to generation.

The site at Garbally Demesne measures roughly thirty metres on its longer axis and twenty on the shorter, running approximately north-northwest to south-southeast. It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1946, already noted as unenclosed and subrectangular, though by that point part of the northern edge had been lost to quarrying and farm building. The tilling of the interior during the 1940s, recalled in local memory, will have disturbed whatever lay beneath. The randomly scattered limestone blocks that survive may be the remnants of a more deliberate arrangement, or they may always have been modest; it is impossible now to say. The wider landscape places the site in old company. A tower house, the kind of fortified residence common to late medieval Connacht, stands roughly two hundred and fifty metres to the southwest, and two ringforts, earthwork enclosures associated with early medieval settlement, lie about three hundred metres to the north.

The ground is grassland, close to a public road, but there is nothing to announce or interpret the site. The slight rise and the scarp are the only physical signals, and they are easy to miss unless you are already looking.

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