Children's Burial Ground, Kilcommadan, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s Burial Ground, Kilcommadan, Co. Galway

Just south of a church in Kilcommadan, County Galway, lies a children's burial ground that has left no mark on the land whatsoever.

No mounds, no stones, no visible trace of any kind survives at ground level. What remains instead is something less tangible: a pair of local traditions that sit uneasily alongside each other, one modest and domestic, one connecting this quiet field to one of the more dramatic episodes of seventeenth-century Irish history.

Children's burial grounds, sometimes called cillíní, were informal sites used across Ireland for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. Local memory holds that a burial took place here around a hundred and fifty years ago, placing it somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. But the more striking tradition concerns a figure from much earlier: Lieut.-General Charles Chalmont, Marquis de Saint-Ruth, the French commander who led Jacobite forces at the Battle of Aughrim in 1691 and was killed there by a cannonball during the fighting. According to local account, his body was brought to this ground initially, before being removed for reinterment at the Carmelite priory in Loughrea. The pairing is an odd one, a temporary resting place for a French general sharing ground with unbaptised children, and it is the kind of detail that local memory preserves long after any physical evidence has gone. The site was recorded as a children's burial ground on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1946, which at least fixes its recognition within living memory even if it cannot confirm the older stories.

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