Children's burial ground, Lockstown, Co. Wicklow

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Lockstown, Co. Wicklow

On a gentle west-facing slope near Lockstown, in the Wicklow uplands, a small rectangular enclosure of upright granite slabs marks a place where unbaptised children were once quietly laid to rest.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used from the medieval period well into the twentieth century for infants who had died before baptism, and as such were excluded from consecrated ground. The church considered them spiritually incomplete, and so communities found their own margins, their own liminal spaces, to bury them. What makes the Lockstown example quietly peculiar is the absence of any visible grave markers within the enclosure, despite the clear intention of the boundary wall, which still stands roughly half a metre high and encloses an area measuring about thirteen and a half metres north to south and just over twelve metres east to west.

The interior of the enclosure sits noticeably higher than the surrounding ground, perhaps by as much as forty centimetres, which may suggest accumulated use over a long period, even if that use has left no legible surface trace. At the centre sits a large earthfast boulder, meaning a stone set firmly in the ground rather than placed as a portable object, and beside it a small cairn about two metres across. Resting against the boulder is a simple granite cross, broken at the top and missing one arm. It carries no inscription that has been recorded, and it is not clear how old it is or who placed it there. The loss of the arm and the top gives it a worn, almost incidental quality, as though it arrived there gradually rather than being set in place with ceremony.

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