Children's burial ground, Cloontakilla, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloontakilla, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field in Cloontakilla, County Mayo, a low mound rises just two metres from the surrounding ground, its steeply sloping sides and narrow flattened top giving it an appearance quite unlike the natural undulations of the landscape around it.

Stones protrude barely clear of the grass along its surface, hinting at a structure beneath rather than mere accumulated earth. This is a cilleen, a type of informal burial ground found across Ireland that was traditionally used for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic convention from consecrated ground. These sites occupy a quiet, ambiguous place in Irish religious and social history, neither fully sanctioned nor entirely forgotten, and many were quietly maintained by local communities long after their original use ceased.

The mound itself is an elongated, irregular oval, roughly ten metres on its north-east to south-west axis and twelve metres across, sitting on an elevation along the southern edge of a stream gully with a higher hill rising on the far bank to the north. In that hill, about thirty-five metres to the north-east, lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typical of early medieval Irish settlement sites, suggesting the broader landscape here has a long history of human use. The cilleen occupies a distinct and bounded position within this terrain, a small elevated island in working farmland. Two commemoration slabs have been placed on the mound in recent decades: one inscribed with "Cilleen 2000 RIP" set upright into the top of the mound, and a second, dated 2011, set in concrete at the mound's north-east edge. The presence of both markers reflects a wider pattern seen across Ireland, where communities have returned in the past generation to acknowledge these once-marginal burial places and the infants interred within them.

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Pete F
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