Children's burial ground, Somerset, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Somerset, Co. Galway

In the townland of Somerset in County Galway, within the circular earthen enclosure of an ancient rath, local memory preserves the knowledge of a children's burial ground that has left no mark whatsoever on the land above it.

No stone, no hollow, no worn path points to where it lies. The rath itself, a ringfort of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, essentially a raised circular bank enclosing a domestic or farming settlement, provides the only surviving physical frame for something that now exists almost entirely in oral tradition.

The association between ringforts and children's burial grounds is not unusual in the Irish countryside, though it is rarely straightforward. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes children who died before receiving the sacraments, were historically excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, and families sought alternative places of interment, often locations already felt to carry some older sanctity or separateness from the everyday world. Ringforts, long understood in folk belief as the dwelling places of the otherworld, were among those chosen. The practice gave rise to a particular category of burial site known in Irish as a cillín, a small, informal, unconsecrated ground used for those excluded from the parish cemetery. At Somerset, no excavation record or documentary source has been traced to confirm the precise location or extent of the burials, and the ground offers nothing visible to the eye.

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