Children's burial ground, Fartamore, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Fartamore, Co. Galway

At the south-eastern entrance to an ancient ringfort in Fartamore, a scattering of low stones set into the inner bank marks what local tradition holds to be a children's burial ground.

These modest grave-markers are easy to miss, flush as they are with the earthwork rather than raised above it, and the site carries no formal monument or signage to announce its purpose. What makes the place unusual is not ceremony or grandeur but the layering of two very different kinds of use compressed into a single landscape feature.

Ringforts, the remains of enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland. This one, recorded under the county inventory reference GA016-052, was built for the living. The practice of burying unbaptised children within or beside such ancient enclosures was, however, widespread in Ireland for centuries, persisting into the twentieth century in some areas. These grounds, known as cillíní or cilliní, served as the quiet alternative to consecrated cemeteries, which Church convention long denied to infants who died before baptism. Ringforts, along with old church ruins, boundaries, and shorelines, were common choices, places already set apart from everyday use and understood by communities as liminal ground. The Fartamore site fits squarely into that tradition, with local knowledge preserving its identity even where the physical evidence is sparse.

The grave-markers here are described as low-set stones flanking the entrance on the inner edge of the bank, so a visitor would need to look carefully and low rather than scanning for upright headstones. The ringfort earthwork itself provides the context, and the south-eastern orientation of the entrance is the clearest guide to where the stones are concentrated.

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