Children's Burying Ground, Clooncona, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Children’s Burying Ground, Clooncona, Co. Galway

In the townland of Clooncona in County Galway, a patch of nettles and thistles marks one of the quieter and more sobering features of the Irish rural landscape: a cillin, or informal burial ground set aside for unbaptised infants.

These sites exist in their hundreds across Ireland, occupying marginal ground, field edges, and, as here, the remains of older earthworks. They were used for centuries to inter children who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be buried in consecrated ground, and they were rarely marked in any formal way.

This particular site sits within the northern half of a rath, the circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead. Raths are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, and it was not unusual for later communities to reuse their interior space for purposes considered outside ordinary parish life. The burying ground here was recorded on the 1947 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an unenclosed oval area measuring roughly 25 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south. When the site was inspected more recently, no grave-markers of any kind were visible; only the dense growth of nettles and thistles betrayed the presence of disturbed or nitrogen-rich ground beneath.

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