Grave Yard, Shanbally, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Shanbally, Co. Galway

A small plot of ground in Shanbally, Co. Galway, holds something quietly sobering: a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, set within the south-eastern corner of an old ecclesiastical enclosure.

Cillíní were places set apart from consecrated ground, used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others who, under the rules of the institutional church, could not be buried in the parish churchyard. What marks this one out is the orderliness of its arrangement: numerous plain, unworked rectangular limestone slabs, left entirely as they were found rather than shaped or inscribed, aligned in rows running north to south across a plot roughly seventeen metres wide and fourteen metres deep.

The site sits to the north of what may be a church, though the building itself has not been definitively identified. The grave-markers are simple to the point of anonymity, which was not unusual for cillíní, where the burials were often unrecorded and the stones selected from whatever lay nearby. One slab-lined grave is also visible, measuring just over a metre in length and a quarter of a metre wide, its modest dimensions a quiet reminder of who was buried here. A fragment of a cross is also associated with the site, suggesting that the broader enclosure had a more formal religious character at some point, even if the children's ground itself remained deliberately understated.

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