Children's Burial Ground

Children's Burial Ground is one of 480 cillíní mapped in County Galway, where unbaptised and stillborn children were buried outside consecrated churchyards from the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Canon Law 1239 barred them from sacred earth, and Franciscan strictness on the west coast may explain why so many such grounds cluster along that shoreline. The small field or hollow marker holds no grand monument, only the quiet weight of children the church would not name, and every cillín is a bruise in the landscape where mercy and doctrine failed to meet.