Children's burial ground, Kilmaloge, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
In a tillage field in County Tipperary, between a road and a railway line, children are buried.
There is nothing to see. No mound, no marker, no trace above ground of any kind. The site is known only through local memory, passed on without the support of any visible evidence to anchor it to the landscape.
The area carries older weight as well. Patrick Power, writing in 1907, identified this same location as the site of an early church, placing it within a broader pattern of early Christian settlement across the Tipperary countryside. It is not unusual to find children's burial grounds, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, in close proximity to such sites. A cillín (the singular form) was typically a marginal or unconsecrated piece of ground used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic ecclesiastical rules, could not be interred in consecrated churchyards. These grounds were often tucked against boundaries, old walls, or forgotten sacred enclosures, and they tend to survive, if at all, as slight earthwork traces or as place memory rather than as formal monuments. At Kilmaloge, even those slight traces appear to have been lost, most likely to generations of ploughing on the gently sloping, west-facing ground.
What remains is the local knowledge itself, the kind of information that rarely makes it into any formal record until someone thinks to write it down. The field continues under tillage, the railway line runs nearby, and the ground gives nothing away.
