Children's burial ground, Killeen, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Killeen, Co. Galway

The name is the clue.

Called simply Lisín, a diminutive of the Irish word for a small enclosure or fort, this quiet burial ground near Killeen in County Galway carries within its title the suggestion of a very particular kind of grief. Killeens, as these small unconsecrated plots are known across Ireland, were traditionally used for the burial of unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice. The diminutive suffix does quiet, sorrowful work here, marking a space set apart from the ordinary order of the dead.

The site lies to the east of a laneway, roughly 270 metres north-northeast of Killeen Castle, and occupies a subrectangular area of approximately 30 metres by 28 metres, enclosed within a stone wall. When the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in the early nineteenth century, the place was recorded as "a burying place now called Lisín," a description preserved in O'Flanagan's 1927 edition of that correspondence. The headstones visible today mark mostly adult burials from the late nineteenth century, which complicates the picture somewhat. The name, however, points to an older and different purpose, one that predates those inscribed stones and may account for the unmarked ground beneath or around them. Whether infants were buried here before the site was later used for adults, or whether both practices overlapped, is not recorded.

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