Children's burial ground, Inchafune, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Inchafune, Co. Cork

On a north-west-facing slope at Inchafune in County Cork, there is a small field that local memory has long called a children's burial ground.

What makes it quietly unsettling is precisely how little remains to show for that name. The rough ground that once marked the site, distinguishable from the surrounding pasture by its uneven, untended character, was effectively erased around 1986, when field fences were removed and the area levelled.

Places like this are sometimes referred to in Irish as cillíní, informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic Church practice, were excluded from consecrated ground. They tend to occupy marginal spaces: field corners, old ringfort interiors, coastal headlands, riverbanks. They were rarely officially recorded and are most often preserved, where they survive at all, through local knowledge passed from one generation to the next. At Inchafune, that oral tradition is what keeps the identity of the site alive, even after the physical evidence was smoothed away by agricultural work in the 1980s. No formal excavation or investigation appears to have accompanied the levelling.

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