Killeen, Dubhoileán Mór, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Killeen, Dubhoileán Mór, Co. Mayo

On the small, now-uninhabited Atlantic island of Duvillaun More, off the coast of Mayo, a cashel, which is a stone-walled early Christian enclosure, holds a particular kind of silence.

Within its walls, unbaptised children were once buried, a practice recorded as far back as 1838 in the Ordnance Survey Letters. These sites, known in Irish as killeens, were used across Ireland for the burial of infants who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be interred in consecrated ground. The absence of any visible grave markers here makes the place all the more quietly unsettling.

The cashel sits amid evidence of a broader human story on the island. About thirty metres to the north lie the ruins of 19th-century vernacular stone houses, their associated field plots and cultivation ridges still legible in the landscape. The use of the cashel as a children's burial ground almost certainly ran alongside this period of settlement, suggesting that the families who farmed and fished from these modest dwellings also brought their unbaptised dead inside the ancient enclosure. Within the eastern half of the cashel interior, there are the remains of a small church, a cross slab, and what appears to be a slab-lined burial, an early grave type in which flat stones are arranged around or over the body. These earlier Christian remains predate the 19th-century community by many centuries, though no visible trace of the children's graves themselves survives today.

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