Children's Burial Ground

Children's Burial Ground in County Clare joins over one thousand six hundred similar sites across Ireland, marking places where unbaptised or stillborn children were laid to rest outside consecrated churchyards. Canon Law kept these young bodies away from sacred soil until Vatican II, forcing families to choose nearby field edges, old monuments, or boundary lines instead. What began as religious exclusion became a landscape of quiet grief, with entire west coast communities shaping whole regions around this bitter practice.