Grave Yard, Gortnamannagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Gortnamannagh, Co. Galway

A small triangular patch of level pastureland in Gortnamannagh, Co. Galway contains something easy to walk past and hard to fully account for: a children's burial ground, its perimeter marked by nothing more dramatic than a low scarp, its interior scattered with set stones indicating graves.

The site measures over five metres in length, and its triangular outline, defined by that slight change in ground level, is the kind of feature that registers as odd only once you know what you are looking at.

Places like this are known in Ireland as cillíní, informal burial grounds used historically for unbaptised infants and others who could not be interred in consecrated ground. They were frequently located at old or liminal sites, away from the main parish cemetery, and their use persisted in some areas into the twentieth century. What gives this particular site an added layer of interest is the name of the nearby village of Calluragh, which the scholar P.W. Joyce, writing in 1923, recorded as meaning an old burial ground. Whether the place-name predates the children's ground or grew from it, the two seem to be in quiet conversation across the fields, one preserving a memory the other has largely ceased to hold.

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Pete F
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