Fort, Lissaniska, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a low hillock rising out of undulating grassland in County Galway, a children's burial ground sits quietly inside what was once a prehistoric fort.
The combination is unusual but not accidental. Across Ireland, such burial grounds, known as cillíní, were frequently established within the enclosures of older earthworks, places already set apart from ordinary land use and understood, in some half-articulated way, as belonging to a different order of things. Children who died unbaptised were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, and so communities found other spaces for them, old and liminal ones.
The fort itself was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a subrectangular enclosure, roughly 25 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. By the time the 1946 edition was produced, it had been partially levelled, and today only a low bank on the eastern side remains to indicate where the original boundary ran. What began as a defined and substantial enclosure on a commanding little summit has been reduced, over roughly a century, to a single earthen remnant.