Eimear Cregg

Cillíní were secret graveyards for babies denied a dignified burial by the Catholic church. Scattered across Ireland’s landscape, in overgrown fields, along lonely coasts, by abandoned ruins and near megalithic cairns are the cillíní. At first glance a cillín appear as nothing more than a pile of stones, shallow dips in the earth, or a moss-covered clearings. These burial sites, unconsecrated, unofficial, and often unnamed, were the final resting places of stillborn and unbaptised infants. The Church taught that unbaptised babies were trapped in Limbo, a kind of eternal spiritual waiting room. Neither hell nor heaven, just a theological nowhere. Denied the basic empathy of entry into consecrated ground, these children were laid to rest in secret, usually at dusk or dawn. Quartz pebbles, seashells, or small rings of stone often marked their graves at these liminal or sacred spaces now abandoned. Tender tokens of humanity in the face of crushing silence. The word cillín comes from cill, meaning a small church or monastic cell. Other names for these locations were calluragh, lisín, cealltrach or kyles. Across Ireland, over 1,400 such sites have been documented, 500 in County Galway alone, 250 in Kerry. Excavations of sixteen cillíní between 1966 and 2004 confirmed the practice dated back at least to the mid-1500s, and likely intensified during the Counter-Reformation, when Catholic doctrine became especially rigid. By the 19th century, things began to shift. Maps, oral traditions, and parish records started to preserve the locations of these sites, though many were lost to farmland, or forgotten as rural populations declined. The 1863 Act mandating birth and death registration complicated the practice but did not extinguish it. In Glasnevin Cemetery, over 115,000 children lie in common graves. By the 1940s and ’50s, families had begun memorialising these plots. Leaving teddies and candles. In Tuam in Galway, the 2012 revelation of 796 children buried in a disused septic tank at a former Mother and Baby Home forced modern Ireland to face these ghosts. As proper excavation begins the Catholic Church will have the opportunity to address and confess its sins to its every decreasing congregations. Since the Second Vatican Council (1960s), the Church has formally relaxed its stance. By 2007, Limbo magically no longer existed. Today, many cillíní are being located, studied. And for what comfort it may bring, some have been consecrated. Others are preserved as archaeological monuments, or commemorated in literature, like Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire or Mary Leland’s The Killeen. Many of these sites also accommodated others deemed unworthy of a “good death”. Victims of suicide, beggars, criminals, shipwrecked strangers, women who died in childbirth outside marriage, and even those considered mentally ill. There’s a line by writer Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: “What cannot be said must be wept.” And in every cillín, tucked tenderly into the folds of the earth, are those unsayable sorrows. Silent grief and love denied, finally given some recognition.