Children's burial ground, Lavy More, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Lavy More, Co. Mayo

Inside a rath on the townland of Lavy More in County Mayo, two small stone slabs sit almost flush with the ground, their narrow edges barely protruding above the grass.

Set roughly 0.8 metres apart, parallel along a northwest to southeast axis, they mark the head and foot of a grave just 0.8 metres long. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, most commonly associated with early medieval settlement, and the one here at Lavy More has a quite different kind of history layered over its older origins.

According to local tradition, the interior of this rath was used for the burial of unbaptised babies. This practice was once widespread across Ireland, where canon law denied church burial to infants who died before baptism. Families turned instead to liminal places, sites that existed somehow outside ordinary consecrated ground, and raths carried a certain logic for this purpose. Already ancient, already set apart, already associated in folk memory with the otherworld, they became informal repositories for those the Church would not receive. The grave visible in the south-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, marked by those two quiet slabs, is the sole one currently identifiable above ground, though local knowledge holds it to be exactly what it appears: a child's resting place.

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