Children's burial ground, Creggaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Grounds
At Creggaun in County Mayo, a prehistoric monument has been quietly pressed into a second life that stretches across centuries.
A court tomb, one of Ireland's earliest megalithic burial forms, characterised by a roofless forecourt of upright stones leading into a chambered cairn, was reused as a burial place for unbaptised infants. These informal cillíní, as such sites were known across Ireland, occupy a particular and sorrowful corner of the country's social history. Under Catholic teaching, children who died before baptism could not be interred in consecrated ground, and so communities found their own solutions, placing the small bodies in marginal or ancient places that sat outside the ordinary religious landscape.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 simply as "Burying ground", and by the 1930 edition the cartographers had recorded it more precisely as "children's burial ground", suggesting the practice was well established and locally understood across that entire period. The decision to use a prehistoric court tomb for this purpose was not unusual in the Irish countryside, where ancient structures carried a liminal quality that made them seem appropriate for those who occupied an ambiguous place in the spiritual order. Today there are no obvious traces of individual graves within the monument, and the tomb itself is largely hidden beneath gorse, brambles, and hawthorn bushes, the kind of dense, thorny growth that tends to colonise undisturbed ground and, in its own way, keeps casual visitors at a distance.