Children's Burial Ground

Children's Burial Ground is a cillín in County Galway where unbaptised and stillborn children were buried outside consecrated churchyards from the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. Canon Law barred them from holy ground, so families carried small bodies to edge-places near water, old tombs or townland boundaries. Galway alone holds nearly five hundred of these quiet margins, testifying that love and fear of rules still met in the dark.