Children's burial ground, Laragh, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Laragh, Co. Galway

At Laragh in County Galway, a ringfort holds a burial ground that has left no mark on the land whatsoever.

No stone, no hollow, no trace of any kind survives above ground. What remains is a category on a map and a local tradition, which is sometimes the most persistent form of memory there is.

The site sits within a ringfort, a type of circular enclosure, usually defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that was a common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Such enclosures were frequently reused in later centuries for purposes quite different from their origins, and children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were among the most common of these secondary uses. Cillíní served as informal burial places for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic Church practice, were excluded from consecrated ground. The association between these liminal graves and older, pre-Christian enclosures was not accidental; ringforts already carried an air of separateness from the everyday world. The Laragh site was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1933, marked explicitly as a children's burial ground, and local tradition had long recognised it as such. Beyond that cartographic moment and that thread of oral knowledge, the ground itself offers nothing.

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