Grave Yard for Children, Attyslany, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard for Children, Attyslany, Co. Clare

In a field of undulating pastureland in County Clare, a low overgrown mound rises barely a metre from the earth.

It is oval in shape, roughly eighteen and a half metres at its widest, and on its surface lie scattered stones that may be grave markers or may simply be fieldstones displaced over generations. The overgrowth makes it impossible to say for certain. This ambiguity is itself part of what this place is: a cillin, or children's burial ground, where infants who died without baptism were laid to rest in unconsecrated ground, outside the boundaries of parish cemeteries, in a practice that endured in Ireland for centuries.

The site at Attyslany appears by name on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1842 and 1920, recorded each time as 'Grave Yard for Children', a plain, candid label that strips away any administrative euphemism. The maps show a suboval, tree-lined enclosure, and the trees visible across those two editions suggest the site retained a distinct character across the decades between surveys. Today the mound survives in a slightly damaged state. At its western end there is a subcircular hollow, roughly four metres across and half a metre deep, which appears to result from digging activity at some point in the site's history, though when or why is not recorded. The stones scattered across the surface are unset and partially obscured by vegetation, their origins uncertain.

Cillini of this kind are found across Ireland, often in marginal or liminal locations, placed at the edges of cultivated land or near old boundaries. They were not formal cemeteries but quiet, practical arrangements made by communities in grief and outside ecclesiastical permission. The Attyslany example sits on a gentle south-westerly slope, its mound low enough that a passing walker might not recognise it for what it is, which is perhaps fitting for a category of place that was, for so long, deliberately kept apart.

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