Formoyle Childrens Burial Ground, Formoyle, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
On a rough grazing terrace some five hundred feet above sea level, near the foot of Gleninagh Mountain in the Burren, a small and irregularly shaped plot holds the unmarked graves of children.
The site, known in Irish as Cillín Formaoil, is a cillín, a type of informal burial ground used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated churchyard burial under Catholic practice. The plot measures roughly seventeen and a half metres north to south and just under fifteen metres east to west. Its eastern boundary follows the line of an older enclosure, while a low natural scarp defines the rest. Simple, unworked stones serve as markers, concentrated in the northern half and arranged occasionally in rough east-west rows, with small flat slabs appearing towards the south.
The site appears by name on both the 1842 and 1915 editions of the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, and again on Tim Robinson's Burren map of 1977, which records it as Cillín Formaoil. Its longer history is murkier. A researcher named Swan, writing in 1991, noted a bullaun stone at this location, a bullaun being a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows, typically associated with early Christian sites in Ireland, and proposed that the site had originated as an early ecclesiastical place before gradually declining to the status of a cillín. Later assessment raised the possibility that Swan had confused this site with a separate bullaun stone and church ruin located around three hundred metres to the south. About six hundred metres to the east-south-east lies the deserted settlement of Cathair Bheannach, a village that was still inhabited into at least the late nineteenth century, according to research by Gilmore published in 1995. The proximity of the cillín to that community is likely no coincidence; small burial grounds of this kind were typically maintained close to the settlements they served, occupying liminal ground outside the parish's formal religious geography.