Children's burial ground, Kinmona, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kinmona, Co. Galway

In a level stretch of Co. Galway pastureland, a low raised mound holds graves that were, for centuries, considered to occupy a space between the ordinary world and consecrated ground.

This is a cillín, a type of informal burial ground used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic canon law, could not be interred in sanctified churchyards. The practice persisted well into the twentieth century, and these small enclosures, quiet and often unmarked on most maps, remain one of the more quietly affecting features of the Irish rural landscape.

The site at Kinmona takes the form of a raised semicircular area, roughly twenty metres east to west and eleven metres north to south, pressing up against the eastern edge of a townland boundary that runs roughly north-north-east to south-south-west. That positioning is significant; cillíní were frequently placed at liminal points in the landscape, on boundaries, near water, or at the edges of settled land, as if to acknowledge their occupants' uncertain status. Several trees have taken root on the mound, and small headstones break through the sod in places. One larger slab-lined grave is also visible, a form of burial construction in which flat stones are arranged on their edges to form a box around the body. The site was noted by McCaffrey in 1952.

The mound sits in ordinary farmland, and there is little to draw the eye from a distance beyond the cluster of trees rising from otherwise open ground. The small headstones are partially submerged by turf accumulation over time, which gives some sense of how long the site has been undisturbed.

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