Children's burial ground, Garryredmond, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Garryredmond, Co. Mayo

In the north-east corner of a pasture field in Garryredmond, County Mayo, the ground slopes gently and the scrub grows thick enough to swallow what lies beneath it.

Local knowledge holds that this is a children's burial ground, one of countless such sites scattered across the Irish countryside, most of them unmarked on any official map and known only through oral tradition passed quietly between neighbours.

These sites are commonly referred to as cillíní, informal burial grounds used historically for unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic doctrine from consecrated churchyards. They tend to occupy liminal spaces, field edges, old boundaries, patches of scrub or bog, places that were neither fully inside nor outside the community's formal sacred geography. The Garryredmond site fits this pattern precisely: tucked into a field corner, on sloping ground, and now concealed beneath dense vegetation. No dimensions, no formal excavation, and no documentary record appear to have been attached to it beyond the memory of local people who know it is there.

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