Killballymahony Burial Ground for Children, Ballymahony, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Killballymahony Burial Ground for Children, Ballymahony, Co. Clare

A low bank of earth and stone, barely knee-height in places, enclosing a roughly rectangular patch of Clare pasture: this is all that remains above ground of a burial ground once set aside specifically for children.

No grave-markers survive. No visible traces of burials interrupt the grass. The enclosure, measuring about 37 metres east to west and just under 32 metres north to south, sits quietly in a multiperiod field system at Ballymahony, bisected by a later field wall that has gradually worn down the western half of its enclosing bank.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 marks it plainly as a raised circular area labelled 'Kilballymahony Burial Gd. for Children', a designation repeated in the 1920 edition as 'Kilballymahony Children's Burial Ground'. The Irish form, Cill Bhaile Uí Mhathgamhna, recorded on Tim Robinson's map of 1977, contains the element cill, meaning a small church or ecclesiastical enclosure, which hints at an older religious function beneath the later use. The OS Letters of 1839 suggest that this site, along with a second children's burial ground about 745 metres to the east-southeast in the neighbouring townland of Ballymurphy, probably originated as chapels of ease, small subsidiary chapels built to serve parishioners who lived at a distance from the main parish church. The nearest parish church was at Noughaval, roughly 1.8 kilometres to the southeast. Chapels of ease frequently fell out of use as parishes were reorganised or populations shifted, and their enclosures sometimes found a second life as burial grounds for unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice until relatively recently.

What remains on the ground reflects that long, layered history. The bank is appreciably more substantial on the eastern side of the modern field wall, where the interior height reaches 0.6 metres and the exterior 1.1 metres, than on the western side, where it has been reduced to as little than 0.2 metres internally and disappears altogether between west and west-northwest. A gap of about 8 metres in the northern side does not appear to be an original entrance. In the western half of the enclosure there is a small, unexplained mound, roughly 3.3 metres in diameter and 0.4 metres high, whose purpose is not recorded.

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