From the 7th Century, through the Middle Ages and continuing to the late 20th Century, unbaptised children were rarely buried in consecrated ground.
Denied access to the graveyard, they were buried in cillíní instead. These remote places were aligned with boundaries in the landscape, on the edges of townlands, at the bottom of cliffs, along the coastline at the sea or the edges of lakes. The locations are thresholds themselves, perched between two different spaces, and evoke a sense of looking back in time. Indeed, they are often sited within prehistoric sites, within ancient stone circles or by standing stones. Sometimes they were in early medieval enclosures, cashels or ringforts that had fallen out of use. These unofficial graveyards form a part of the Irish landscape, numbering several thousand across Ireland.
The babies were buried in the dark. The day the infant died the father would take the body from the home and journey on their own to the cillín which could be some distance away. They would then bury the infant between nightfall and dawn. These are bleak places. The level of neglect, the erasure, all echo the exclusion from communal ritual. Such a hard place at the end of what must have been a dreadful day, it was still a site where a solitary man gave care to a newly dead infant, a form of ritual in an ancient place.
Image: Cillín, Ballydawley, Sligo, 2018, Tommy Weir, Pigment print on Hahnemuehle Rag, 110 x 81.5cm, Image courtesy of the artist.
