Children's burial ground, Mountross, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Mountross, Co. Galway

In the townland of Mountross in north County Galway, a children's burial ground has effectively ceased to exist, except on paper.

It survives in the cartographic record, noted on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, but by the time the third edition was published in 1922, the mapmakers had added a quiet qualification: "(Site of)". No visible surface trace remains today, and the landowner on whose ground it lies was found to be entirely unaware of its existence.

This was a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from burial in Catholic churchyards, a practice that persisted from the medieval period well into the twentieth century. Such sites were often placed in liminal or ancient locations, on boundaries, beside old roads, or, as here, within the earthwork of a ringfort. Ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, carried an ambiguous presence in the landscape long after they were abandoned; regarded in folklore as the dwelling places of the otherworld, they were also, paradoxically, chosen for burials that sat outside the formal structures of the Church. The particular ringfort at Mountross is recorded separately in the Galway archaeological inventory, suggesting the two features, the enclosure and the burial ground within it, were noted as distinct but related elements of the same parcel of ground.

What makes this site quietly unsettling is precisely the completeness of its disappearance. The cartographic bracket around "Site of" is doing a great deal of work: it marks the moment official record-keepers acknowledged that a place had gone, while still insisting on recording where it had been. The ground holds no sign of what was once there, and the person farming it had no knowledge of it at all.

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