Children's burial ground, Killola, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At the eastern edge of an early ecclesiastical enclosure in Killola, County Galway, a low, overgrown platform holds the remains of a children's burial ground.
These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic practice, could not be buried in consecrated ground. They occupy a quietly ambiguous space in the Irish landscape, neither fully inside nor fully outside the Church's jurisdiction, often sited near ancient religious boundaries rather than in open fields.
The ground here appears on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1899, marked as an unenclosed, roughly D-shaped area measuring around twenty metres across. It sits within a larger early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of curving boundary that often preserves the footprint of an early medieval monastic or church site long after the buildings themselves have vanished. What remains visible today is the overgrown platform, partially concealed by vegetation, with numerous small upright stones breaking through the growth. At the western end, a lintelled grave survives, its covering stone still in place across the uprights, a construction type associated with early medieval burial in Ireland. Whether such a grave predates the cillín's use as a children's burial ground, or belongs to the same tradition, is not recorded.