Old Grave Yard, Magheraboy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Old Grave Yard, Magheraboy, Co. Mayo

A level patch of grass inside an enclosure in Magheraboy, County Mayo gives almost nothing away.

There are no headstones, no mounds, no markers of any kind, yet two successive Ordnance Survey maps tell a different story about what this quiet ground once held.

The site appears on the 1838 OS six-inch map simply as "Old Grave Yd.", a label that suggests the place was already considered old at the time of surveying. By the 1920 edition, the designation had shifted to "Children's Burial Ground", a term that points toward a very particular tradition in Irish rural life. These sites, sometimes called cillíní, were informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic practice of the period, could not be interred in consecrated ground. They were typically located at the margins, in liminal spots such as old enclosures, ringfort interiors, or townland boundaries. The enclosure at Magheraboy fits that pattern. Today, no physical traces of graves remain visible in the grassed interior, which makes the gap between the cartographic record and the present ground surface all the more striking. A place that was meaningful enough to be named and renamed across two map editions has since been absorbed back into the landscape without a visible trace.

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