Children's burial ground, Pollacorragune, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Pollacorragune, Co. Galway

In a field in north County Galway, a low grassed-over bank with a few protruding limestone rocks is the only outward sign of a children's burial ground.

There are no grave-markers, no inscriptions, no visible graves at all. What makes the spot quietly remarkable is the suggestion that this portion of an ancient enclosure bank was deliberately left undisturbed, its integrity preserved out of an unspoken respect for what lies within it.

The burial ground sits within the north-western quadrant of a larger enclosure, a roughly circular or oval earthwork of the kind commonly found across rural Ireland, often of early medieval origin. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered, under strict Catholic doctrine, ineligible for consecrated ground. They were typically sited at liminal places, old ringforts, ancient earthworks, or the margins of fields, places already set apart from ordinary use. At Pollacorragune, the enclosure bank itself seems to have been the chosen location, and the fact that this particular section survives relatively intact, while the surrounding earthwork may have suffered the usual attritions of farming and time, points to a local memory that kept it safe.

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