Children's burial ground, Kilmannin, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kilmannin, Co. Mayo

At Kilmannin in County Mayo, a field of pasture holds a burial ground that is effectively invisible.

No grave markers survive, no boundary wall or ditch announces the edge of the site, and the ground gives nothing away to a casual eye. What we know of its shape and location comes almost entirely from a dashed line on a 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where the annotation reads simply "Children's Burial Gd." That cartographic trace is now among the most substantial evidence that this place exists at all.

The site was a cillín, a type of informal burial ground found across Ireland where unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, typically at the margins of parishes and often beside older, ruined religious sites. Here, the ground appears to have surrounded the remains of a medieval church, and the 1916 map suggests a roughly rectangular area of approximately seventeen metres east to west and twelve metres north to south. Whether that outline ever corresponded to a visible enclosure is no longer clear. A commercial gravel quarry has since eaten into the landscape around the church ruin, coming to within two metres of its northern wall and fifteen metres of its western wall. The burial ground has in all likelihood been partially destroyed by that quarrying, though the full extent of the loss is impossible to determine precisely, given how little survives at ground level to measure against.

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