Children's burial ground, Kiltultoge, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kiltultoge, Co. Roscommon

A small rectangle of coniferous trees on a low ridge in County Roscommon marks a place that was once used to bury children outside the bounds of consecrated ground.

There are no grave-markers here, nothing to identify individual burials, and yet the site has retained its local name, Rath na nÉag, meaning the rath of the dead.

Sites like this are known in Irish as cillíní, informal burial grounds used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes strangers or suicides, who were denied burial in churchyards under Catholic canon law. The practice was widespread across Ireland and continued well into the twentieth century. At Kiltultoge, the enclosure measures roughly 21.5 metres east to west and 15.6 metres north to south. Its western and southern edges are defined by low stone-facing, between 0.3 and 0.5 metres high, while the eastern side is marked by a scarp of similar height. The northern perimeter has been cut by a lane running east to west, which has removed part of the original boundary. The name Rath na nÉag suggests the local community at some point associated the enclosed ground with an older earthwork, a rath being a circular or roughly circular ringfort of early medieval origin, though the rectangular shape here and the burial use point to a different function.

The mature conifers planted across the site now define it visually, giving what is otherwise an unremarkable field boundary a quiet, distinct presence on the ridge. No grave-markers survive in place, which is typical of cillíní; burials were rarely commemorated with permanent stone, and the identities of those interred have long since passed out of living memory. The local name is the site's most durable monument.

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