Graves, Clogharevaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Graves, Clogharevaun, Co. Galway

In the gently undulating pastureland of Clogharevaun, County Galway, a low platform of earth and loose stones marks a place where unbaptised children were once laid to rest, quietly and without ceremony.

These burial grounds, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, occupy a peculiar position in the landscape and in the historical memory of rural Ireland. Because the Catholic Church long refused to inter unbaptised infants in consecrated ground, families buried them instead in liminal spaces: old ring-forts, cliff edges, the boundaries of fields, and small enclosed plots like this one. The practice persisted well into the twentieth century, and the sites were rarely documented, rarely maintained, and rarely spoken of.

The Clogharevaun site is modest in scale and ambiguous in its current form. The original Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced in the nineteenth century and remain a vital reference for Irish field archaeology, recorded it as an unenclosed circular area less than ten metres in diameter. On the ground today, what survives is a subrectangular earthen platform measuring roughly six metres by five, its edges poorly preserved. About three metres to the west, a degraded scarp, a low slumped bank or slope in the ground, may represent what was once the outer boundary of the site. The interior is scattered with loose stones that were probably grave-markers at some point, though their original arrangement has long since been disturbed. Nothing here is tidy or legible in the way of a formal cemetery, which is in some sense the point.

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