Cillín

A cillín (Irish: meaning "little church or burial ground"; plural cillíní), was a historical unconsecrated burial place in Ireland for children unbaptised at the time of death.^[1] Suicides, shipwrecked sailors, strangers, urepentant murderers and their victims were also sometimes buried there—they were used for "infants and other ambiguous categories of individual".^[2] Some of them are more than 1,000 years old. Ancient pagan burial practices were sometimes later co-opted by Christianity.^[2]

The word cillín is a common element in Irish place names, often anglicised as Killeen.^[3] An alternative meaning of cillín indicates a small church, from the diminutive form of Irish: cill, meaning church. The word is thought to come from the Latin: cella, meaning little church or oratory.^[2]

List of cillíns

Cillín (flattened) near Ballycastle, County Mayo

Cillín Phádraig (Irish: meaning "Patrick's little church") at Maumeen near Maam Cross

• Carrowkeel, County Galway.
• Corcullen, Moycullen, County Galway.
• Many others may easily be found marked on Irish Ordnance Survey maps.

References

1. ^ Cillín. Placenames Database of Ireland. Retrieved: 2011-01-10.
2. ^ ^{a b c} The origins of the Irish Cillin: the segregation of infant burials within an early medieval enclosure at Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. Brendon Wilkins. Paper presented to the Theoretical Archaeology Group, Columbia University, 2008.
3. ^ Killeen. Placenames Database of Ireland. Retrieved: 2011-01-10.