Children's Burial Place, Caltra, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In a field in Caltra, County Galway, there is a walled enclosure where unbaptised children were buried, a practice that speaks to one of the more quietly sorrowful aspects of pre-modern Irish Catholic life.
These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for infants who died before baptism and were therefore considered ineligible for consecrated ground. They tend to occupy liminal spaces: old ruins, townland boundaries, the edges of bogs. This one, however, has an additional layer of strangeness. It is associated with a structure locally described as a Nunnery, and its graves are thought to occupy the remains of a possible chapel.
The Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Donovan's teams in the nineteenth century, and later edited by Michael O'Flanagan and published in 1927, record that children were interred within the vestiges of this ruined structure. What survives is a low rectangular platform, roughly 15.5 metres east to west and 14 metres north to south, raised about half a metre above the surrounding ground. It is enclosed by a mortared stone wall up to two metres high and about 0.6 metres thick, with a gateway at the western end of the southern wall. An earthen field bank runs northward from the eastern side. Inside, the ground is overgrown and partially filled with rubble, but numerous set stones are visible, each oriented east to west in the traditional Christian manner. A single simple gravestone at the western end bears a date of 1871, the only legible marker in an otherwise anonymous ground.
The juxtaposition of the cillín with what may be ecclesiastical remains is unusual. Most such children's burial grounds were chosen precisely because they stood outside any formal religious context; the presence here of a possible chapel, and a mortared enclosure wall substantial enough to have required real construction effort, suggests that whatever this place was, it carried some local significance well beyond an informal patch of marginal land. The 1871 gravestone implies the site was still in use within living memory of the late nineteenth century, and the careful east-west alignment of the graves within the rubble suggests a community that, whatever the theological constraints placed on these children, still buried them with a quiet sense of ritual.