Children's burial ground, Ballyglass, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On a low rise beside a country road in Ballyglass, County Galway, there is a patch of overgrown ground that does not announce itself as anything particular.
No headstones, no enclosing wall, no marker of any kind survives at the surface. Yet this unremarkable-looking rise once served as a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants, and occasionally for others considered outside the bounds of formal Catholic burial rites. These sites were typically placed at liminal spots, townland boundaries, old raths, or roadsides, locations that occupied a kind of threshold in both the physical and spiritual landscape.
The site at Ballyglass is recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1932, where it is marked as an unenclosed subrectangular area measuring roughly 45 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. That cartographic record is now among the clearest evidence that the site exists at all. It sits along the road that traces the eastern boundary of the townland, a positioning consistent with the broader Irish tradition of placing such grounds at the margins of inhabited or owned land. Today the area is overgrown and no visible surface trace remains, which means the 1932 map captures a moment when someone still considered it worth recording, even as the practice of using such grounds was fading from living memory.