Children's burial ground, Moneymore, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Moneymore, Co. Galway

Within a heavily overgrown rath near Moneymore in County Galway, rows of limestone boulders lie quietly arranged across the interior ground, and their purpose is not entirely certain.

What they may mark, according to McCaffrey's 1952 survey, is a children's burial ground, of the kind once found across rural Ireland in places known as cillíní. These were informal, unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants and others excluded from Church burial were interred, often within older earthworks or on liminal ground at the edge of settled land.

The rath itself, a type of circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, provides the physical frame for whatever lies within. The boulder alignments are concentrated in the centre and western sector of the interior. Whether they represent grave markers, boundary lines within the site, or something else altogether remains a matter of interpretation rather than confirmed excavation. The reference to McCaffrey's work places the earliest recorded attention to this site in the early 1950s, though the burials themselves, if that is what they are, would belong to a tradition stretching back centuries and persisting in some areas into the twentieth.

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