Cross-slab, Addergoole More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
Among a scatter of rubble in a children's burial ground in Addergoole More, County Galway, sits a small boulder with a crude single-line cross incised into its surface.
It is not an elaborate monument, not a dressed stone with careful lettering. Just a rough mark on a rough rock, the kind of thing that could be walked past without a second glance.
Children's burial grounds, known in Irish tradition as cilліní, were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic practice from consecrated ground. The crosses at Addergoole More are distributed across the site: one boulder lies in the south-east sector, noted among surrounding rubble and positioned to the east of a neighbouring cross-slab, while another similarly inscribed boulder lies in the south-south-west sector of the same ground. The repetition is telling. These were not isolated gestures but part of a broader, if understated, practice of marking the space as sacred, of insisting, quietly, that something religious had happened here even if the Church would not formally recognise it.