Lisheenaloughil Childrens Burial Ground, Gortlecka, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Lisheenaloughil Childrens Burial Ground, Gortlecka, Co. Clare

At the south-western edge of a turlough, the seasonally flooding lake-type characteristic of the limestone karst country of County Clare, a small oval mound sits beneath a canopy of hazel and ash.

It is just over ten metres at its longest and rises to perhaps a metre and a half at its north-eastern end. Around eight flat stones rest on its surface, not set into the ground as headstones would be, but lying loosely on the cairn itself. This is a cillín, a children's burial ground, one of thousands scattered across Ireland where infants who died unbaptised were interred outside consecrated ground, excluded by church teaching from formal parish cemeteries.

The site was already named and mapped by 1842, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch series recorded it as a small rectangular enclosure with the placename Lisheenalaughil attached. By 1897 the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey plan showed it differently, as a partly raised oval, and added the word "Disused", a designation repeated on the 1920 Cassini edition of the six-inch map. The shift from rectangular to oval between those surveys may reflect how the ground itself settled and spread over time, or simply a more careful observation on the part of later surveyors. The name Lisheenaloughil contains the Irish word for a small lough or lake, which makes quiet sense given the turlough immediately beside it. The surrounding woodland, with land rising to both the north-west and south-east, gives the mound a degree of enclosure that such sites often possess, set apart from the everyday landscape in a way that was presumably deliberate.

The grave-marker stones lying across the surface rather than standing upright are an unusual detail. Whether they were always placed flat, or have gradually shifted over generations of disuse, is not clear, but their presence confirms that the people buried here were not simply forgotten by those who put them in the ground.

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