Children's burial ground, Belderny, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Inside a ringfort in Belderny, County Galway, there is a small rectangular patch of ground where children were buried, their graves marked by uninscribed limestone slabs, most of which have long since collapsed and disappeared beneath the grass.
No names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. The stones simply record a presence, and even that record is fading.
This is a cillin, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic tradition. Such sites were often placed at the margins, literally and symbolically: beside old boundaries, ancient earthworks, or liminal landscape features. The choice of a ringfort here is not incidental. Ringforts, which are enclosed circular farmsteads dating primarily from the early medieval period, carried a complex presence in later Irish folk memory, associated with the otherworld and with ambiguous protective power. Burying unbaptised children within one placed them, in a sense, outside ordinary society but not entirely abandoned. The Belderny site measures roughly 15.8 metres north to south and 13.5 metres east to west, and was recorded by Claffey in 1983 as unenclosed and in fair condition, the grave-markers numerous but mostly fallen.