Children's burial ground, Dalgin, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Dalgin, Co. Galway

In the rolling grassland of the former Dalgin estate in County Galway, there is a shallow, tree-filled hollow about twenty metres across, ringed by an earthen bank and the faint trace of a fosse, a shallow ditch, along its eastern and southern edges.

No headstones break the surface. Nothing marks who lies here, or how many. It is locally regarded as a cillín, a children's burial ground, one of hundreds of such sites scattered across Ireland where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others who were barred from consecrated ground, were quietly interred outside the formal structures of the Church.

The site appeared on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1930, which recorded it as a small circular hollow. That cartographic trace, combined with local memory, is essentially what anchors it to its purpose. The earthen bank and possible external fosse suggest the ground may have been deliberately enclosed at some point, though whether this happened before or after it came to be used as a burial place is not clear. Cillíní were rarely documented in any official sense; they existed in the landscape and in community knowledge rather than in parish registers or estate records, which is part of why so many have no grave-markers and leave so little physical evidence beyond the shape of the ground itself.

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