Children's burial ground, Caltraghcreen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At Caltraghcreen in County Galway, a quiet patch of ground holds two layers of the past at once.
Within the flattened remains of an ancient ringfort, a children's burial ground occupies an unenclosed rectangular area, roughly twenty metres north to south and just under ten metres wide. Small plain stones, arranged in orderly rows and aligned north to south, mark the graves. There are no elaborate monuments here, no inscriptions; only the careful arrangement of the stones suggests that this was a place of deliberate, attentive burial.
The site belongs to a tradition found across Ireland of burying unbaptised infants, and occasionally stillborn children, in ground set apart from consecrated parish cemeteries. These places are known in Irish as cillíní, and they tend to occupy liminal spaces: the edges of townlands, the shores of rivers, or, as here, the interiors of prehistoric enclosures. The ringfort itself, a type of circular earthwork farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, had already been levelled by the time the burial ground came into use, so the community was burying its children inside a feature that had long since lost its original function. The name Caltraghcreen, like many Irish placenames, likely encodes something of the landscape's older uses, though the burial ground as described gives no precise dates for when it was in active use.