Children's burial ground, Sheeanmore, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Burial Grounds
On the lower southern slopes of Sheeanmore Hill in County Sligo, a roughly rectangular enclosure sits quietly in pasture, its low earthen and stone bank enclosing thirteen small cairns of rubble limestone.
The cairns, each averaging about two metres across and only thirty centimetres high, mark what local tradition identifies as an infants' burial ground. These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used across Ireland for centuries to inter unbaptised children and others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground; they occupy a kind of liminal geography, outside the parish graveyard but not quite beyond care. This one, modest in scale and unannounced by any signage, carries that same quality of deliberate, quiet separation.
The enclosure measures roughly fourteen metres east to west and thirteen metres north to south. Its bank, built of earth and stone and ranging from just over two metres to four metres in width, is revetted on the inner eastern face with limestone slabs laid on edge, and similarly revetted along the south-eastern, southern, and south-western stretches of the outer face. There is no visible fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies an earthen bank of this kind, which gives the boundary a softer, more settled appearance at ground level. At the northern side, a probable entrance is marked by a pair of upright rectangular limestone slabs set just forty centimetres apart and projecting inward from the bank, the taller of the two standing a metre high. Alongside the thirteen cairns, five roughly quarried limestone blocks are scattered across the interior without any clear order, perhaps displaced markers or remnants of an earlier arrangement. A mound barrow sits visible in the background to the west, suggesting this hillside has drawn human attention across more than one period of history.