Children's burial ground, Moorneen, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Moorneen, Co. Galway

On the inland slope of a grassy dune south of Sellerna Bay in Connemara, a scattering of small boulders marks one of Ireland's quieter and more melancholy landscape features: a cillín, an informal burial ground used for unbaptised children.

These sites, found across the country in marginal locations such as old ringforts, shorelines, and field boundaries, were where families laid infants who, under Catholic practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground. The one at Moorneen is a small, unenclosed area of roughly 28 metres by 18 metres, with no wall or ditch to define it, just the boulders themselves, some of which are arranged to outline the shapes of rectangular graves.

What makes this particular site worth noting is the detail of its continued use. According to information gathered by the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, whose meticulous fieldwork across Connemara documented countless such places, the ground at Moorneen was still being used as recently as the early 1990s, perhaps thirty years before the inventory that recorded it was published. That is not the distant past. One of the boulders on the site is quartz, a stone with a long association in Irish tradition with burial and the marking of sacred or liminal spaces, its whiteness visible even under low light. The site sits close to a stream that forms a townland boundary, a placing that is typical of cillíní, which were often deliberately located at the edges of things, at the limits of parishes, properties, and the living world.

The site lies about 25 metres east of that boundary stream, on ground that would have been known locally even if it carried no official marker. The boulders are the only indication of what lies beneath, and some of them define grave shapes clearly enough to be recognised for what they are.

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