Cillín

A cillín (from the Irish language, with the literal meaning "little cell", "little churchyard" or "little burial ground"; plural cillíní^[1]), was a historical unconsecrated burial place in Ireland for children unbaptised at the time of death.^[2] Suicides, shipwrecked sailors, strangers, unrepentant murderers and their victims were also sometimes buried there—they were used for "infants and other ambiguous categories of individual".^[3] Some of them are more than a thousand years old. Ancient pagan burial practices were sometimes later co-opted by Christianity.^[3]

The word cillín is a common element in Irish place names, often anglicised as Killeen.^[4] 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.^[3] Another meaning for the word cillín is "cell" as in prison cell or monastic cell (many placenames are derived from the cell of a local monk/saint).

Sometimes these graveyards were called lisín, a diminutive form of the Irish term lios for a ringfort.^[5][6] Also lisín leanbh as a variant form.^[7]

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.

External links

• Cillíní: historical and doctrinal background, cillini.org
• The forgotten dead: The cillíní and disused burial grounds of Ballintoy, County Antrim, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Third Series, Vol. 58, 1999
• The Tradition of Separate Burials in Ireland: Cilliní and Place, by Emma Pankey, cola.unh.edu
• Böll’s artist son revisits sites where Achill’s unbaptised buried, The Irish Times, May 3, 2014

References