Grave Yard, Rathwilladoon, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Rathwilladoon, Co. Galway

A small oval of ground in Rathwilladoon, east Galway, holds a scattering of stones and slabs arranged with no apparent order, sloping gently downhill toward the east.

There is no enclosing wall, no formal entrance, no inscribed markers of any kind. A mature tree grows from the centre of it. The whole thing measures roughly 24 metres along its longer axis and just over 11 metres across. It is the kind of place that could easily be walked past without a second thought.

What gives the site its quiet weight is the designation attached to it: possibly a children's burial ground. In Irish tradition, such places, sometimes called cillíní or ceallúnaigh, were set aside for the burial of unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice well into the twentieth century. Parents were left to find marginal spaces, often ancient or ambiguous ones, land that sat outside the usual order of things. The proximity of this particular burial ground to a rath, an Iron Age or early medieval earthwork enclosure located just 40 metres to the north-west, suggests the site may have been chosen at least in part because of that sense of existing outside sanctioned boundaries. Raths were long regarded in folk belief as charged or liminal spaces, associated with the otherworld, and burials near them are not unusual across Ireland.

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Pete F
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