Children's burial ground, Garranbane, Co. Limerick

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Garranbane, Co. Limerick

At the edge of a commercial forestry plantation in south County Limerick, two streams converge near a county boundary, and somewhere in the curve of one of them lies a burial ground that has effectively vanished.

No headstones mark the spot, no visible enclosure remains, and the site is acknowledged to be difficult to locate even with prior knowledge of where to look. What survives is essentially cartographic memory and the recollections of local people who pointed surveyors in the right direction as recently as 1999.

The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map annotates the location as 'Kill Burial Ground for Children', depicting it as a small circular enclosure of approximately twenty metres in diameter, outlined with a dotted line. The prefix 'kill' derives from the Irish 'cill', meaning a church or monastic cell, though in this context the name likely attached itself to a site used for the burial of unbaptised infants, a practice common across Ireland into the twentieth century. Such grounds, known as cillíní, were typically placed at boundaries, liminal spaces considered neither fully within nor outside consecrated land. This site sits precisely at such a threshold: the stream on its eastern side forms the townland boundary with Meentolla, while the stream to the west marks the boundary with Inchadrinagh in County Tipperary. By the 1897 twenty-five-inch OS revision, the circular enclosure had been dropped from the map entirely, replaced only by the annotation 'Infants' Burial Ground (Disused)'. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted it in 1904 to 1905 simply as a 'burial-ground on the Clare River, on the edge of Tipperary', suggesting it was already a marginal footnote by then.

A field inspection carried out in 1999 found no above-ground trace of the burial ground and no grave markers of any kind. The location was confirmed only through local knowledge, situating it within a u-shaped bend of the meandering north-south stream. The site sits close to the Clare River near the Limerick and Tipperary border, at the edge of forestry that has likely altered the immediate landscape considerably since the earlier OS surveys. Google Earth imagery from 2002 and 2018 may help orient a visitor to the general area, though the ground itself offers little guidance. Anyone attempting to find it should treat the two converging streams and the townland boundaries as the primary navigational references, and should expect to find nothing visible on arrival.

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