Children's burial ground, Tirur, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Tirur, Co. Galway

In a low-lying field in Tirur, County Galway, a slight triangular mound rises barely a metre and a half above the surrounding grassland.

There are no headstones, no inscriptions, no visible markers of any kind. What identifies this unremarkable swell of earth as a burial ground is local memory alone, passed down through the community long after the last interment took place.

The site is what is known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a children's burial ground, where infants who died unbaptised were laid to rest outside the bounds of consecrated ground. Catholic doctrine held for centuries that unbaptised children could not be buried in parish cemeteries, and so families turned instead to marginal places, old earthworks, field boundaries, and ancient mounds, often sites that already carried a sense of the liminal or the old. The mound at Tirur measures roughly thirty metres on its longer axis and fifteen on the shorter, its flat top suggesting it may have had an earlier function long before it became a place of quiet, unofficial burial. According to local tradition, the ground remained in use until around 1930, meaning that within living memory of the mid-twentieth century, families in this part of North Galway were still carrying small bodies to this unmarked rise in a field.

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