Children's burial ground, Kildermot, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kildermot, Co. Mayo

On a narrow ridge top above Balymore Lake in County Mayo, a small irregular terrace wraps around the eastern, southern, and south-western sides of a ruined church.

The ground there is quiet and grass-grown, and what marks it as unusual are dozens of low, upright stones scattered across the surface, most of them barely clearing the turf. None carry any inscription. They are grave-markers for children, and the site has been used as such for long enough to appear on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1838 and 1929.

This type of site is known in Irish as a cillín, a practice of burying unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and sometimes others considered ineligible for consecrated ground in marginal or liminal locations, often beside old ruins, on townland boundaries, or at the edges of water. The Kildermot burial ground fits that pattern closely. Its position is defined as much by the landscape as by any enclosure: to the south-east, the terrace ends at a two-metre scarp that drops sharply toward the lake shore, while a low sod-covered stony scarp marks the south-western edge. Field fences close off the north-east and west. The church itself forms the north-western boundary of the burial area. The whole enclosed space measures roughly thirty metres along its longest axis and narrows considerably toward its south-western end. Within that shape, the uninscribed stones sit at irregular intervals, a kind of mute record of grief that the landscape has absorbed almost entirely.

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Pete F
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