Children's burial ground, Kilcloggaun, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kilcloggaun, Co. Galway

In the scrubland east of the Gortaghokera house cluster in County Galway, a low drystone wall encloses a roughly circular patch of overgrown ground about twenty-five metres across.

There are no headstones, no inscriptions, and no visible markers of any kind. Without knowing what it is, you might walk past it entirely.

The site is a cillín, known here by its Irish name, Lisín na bPáistí, meaning the little enclosure of the children. Cillíní were informal burial grounds used across Ireland for centuries to inter those who, under Catholic practice, could not be buried in consecrated ground: unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and occasionally others considered outside the formal rites of the Church. They are deeply quiet places, reflecting a grief that was largely private and unrecorded. This particular one was already considered disused by the time the second edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1933, which labelled it as such, suggesting its active use had ceased well before the twentieth century was under way. The absence of headstones is not unusual for sites of this kind; markers, where they existed at all, were often simple stones without inscription, and many have long since been absorbed by vegetation or removed.

The interior is heavily overgrown, and the surrounding terrain is scrubland, so the site does not present itself easily to a casual visitor. What remains, aside from the wall and the ground it encloses, is the name itself, preserved in Irish, carrying in its syllables more information about the place and its purpose than anything visible on the surface.

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