Where the crying was heard: uncovering Mayo’s hidden cillíní through folklore

On a quiet stretch of land in Mayo, a small rise in a field or a scatter of stones at a boundary wall may pass unnoticed. By their nature, cillíní are quiet places. Often small, unmarked and tucked into the edges of fields, ringforts or coastal ground. To those who know, however, these unassuming places carry extraordinary weight.

Cillíní—children’s burial grounds—are sites where unbaptised infants and other marginalised dead were laid to rest for centuries. 

Though often invisible in the modern landscape, they remain deeply present in memory, folklore, and, increasingly, archaeological research.

Professor Marion Dowd, archaeologist at the Atlantic Technological University, has studied  the folklore surrounding children’s burial grounds across Ireland. Her recent research, published in the Journal of Art Archaeology, brings together archaeology and folklore to uncover not just where cillíní are located, but how communities understood, feared, and protected them.

“The focus of the project was looking at folklore associated with children’s burial grounds,” she explains. “I went through the National Folklore Collection, which is digitised and available online, and collected all references to folklore relating to children’s burial grounds. Then I looked at the different themes that appeared and tried to attach those stories to actual sites in the landscape.”

Dowd’s study began not with a shovel in the ground, but with stories. Drawing extensively on the National Folklore Collection—much of it gathered by schoolchildren in the 1930s—she traced references to children’s burial grounds across Ireland. These handwritten accounts, rooted in local knowledge, offered vivid descriptions of places that were sometimes known only to families or landowners and never formally recorded.

“Folklore tends to float in space,” Dowd explains. “We know the story, but we don’t know exactly which place it refers to.” One of her key aims was to anchor these stories in the physical landscape—to identify which tales belonged to which places, and to see whether those places still existed.

In many cases, they did. By cross-referencing folklore accounts with maps and local geography, Prof Dowd was able to identify a number of children’s burial grounds that had never been formally recorded. In the research paper itself, she identified 11 new sites. Since then, working in neighbouring Sligo, she has identified 30 more.

“The number is increasing all the time,” she says.

Mayo stands out in this research, as it is one of the counties with the highest number of known children’s burial grounds in Ireland, especially along the western coast. While scholars are not entirely sure why the western counties have such a density of these sites, Dowd notes that the traditions surrounding them are particularly strong in Mayo, with a rich body of associated folklore.

“Mayo, Galway, Kerry and Clare all have strong traditions around children’s burial grounds,” Prof Dowd explains. “We’re not entirely sure why they’re more common along the western seaboard than in the Midlands or the east, but the folklore traditions in Mayo are very strong.”

That folklore often acted as a form of protection. One of the recurring themes Prof Dowd encountered is what folklorists call “prohibitive folklore” — stories warning against disturbing burial grounds.

The title of her article, Every Night, the Crying of Babies, comes from one such account collected in County Kerry in the 1930s. A farmer who ploughed up a children’s burial ground was said to hear babies crying every night until he restored the site.

“It’s a way of saying this should not have happened,” she says. “Once the burial ground was reinstated, the crying stopped. It’s almost like a nightmare effect.”

Other traditions are quieter but no less powerful. In Mayo, as elsewhere, there is the belief in the “stray sod”: that stepping, even unknowingly, on the grave of an unbaptised child will bring misfortune. Such beliefs may sound like superstition, but Dowd urges a more nuanced reading.

“I don’t think reliability is necessarily the right word,” she says. “Folklore always contains an echo of truth.” 

Beyond guiding researchers to forgotten sites, these stories may also encode grief and trauma, particularly the pain experienced by parents who lost children in circumstances shaped by religious and social exclusion. 

“Folklore can lead us into the landscape and help us identify places that were known about in the past,” she says. “But it also reveals the trauma families experienced, particularly parents who lost a baby and had to bury them in one of these grounds. That emotional weight is often wrapped up in the stories.”

In this sense, folklore becomes a way of expressing sorrow that could not always be spoken openly.

In Mayo, many cillíní were known locally — by landowners or neighbouring families — but never formally recorded. Despite their emotional and cultural significance, cillíní are among Ireland’s most vulnerable archaeological sites. They are often small and visually unimposing. Without formal recognition, they have no legal protection. Farming, construction, or land improvement can destroy them accidentally and irreversibly.

“That’s the key issue,” Prof Dowd explains. “If a burial ground isn’t marked on an archaeological map, it doesn’t have legal protection. These sites are very vulnerable. They’re small, often ephemeral, and can be destroyed accidentally through farming or construction.”

This vulnerability makes recording them urgent. This is why Prof Dowd’s work matters far beyond academia. By identifying and registering these burial grounds with the National Monuments Service, they can be legally protected.

“If we can get more of these sites registered, they become protected archaeological monuments,” she says. “That’s hugely important.”

Many are already known locally, but unless they appear on official records, that knowledge can be lost within a generation.

Dowd hopes her research will encourage landowners and communities to come forward if they know of a cillín that has not yet been recorded. “They should contact the National Monuments Service and have it registered. Once they’re registered, they’re protected,” she says simply.

For Mayo, where development, farming and land use continue to reshape the landscape, listening to local knowledge may be the last chance to safeguard many of these sites.