One feature of the west of Ireland landscape are the Cillins...the babies burial grounds. Every Parish will have at least one...in the corner of a field or within a ring fort or situated on or near the site of an early Christian church...
We have one two fields from us, in a ring fort which was once the site of an early village...there are also the fragmented stone remains of what is thought to be a very early Church.
It was never actually part of the Catholic Churches doctrine, but the priests and the Vatican supported the idea, which came about through St. Augustine, that babies who died before being baptised were sent to 'limbo' a sort of nether land between heaven and earth...it grew from un-baptised babies, to include strangers to the parish...people who'd taken their own life...the occasional murderer and then, at the time of the Great Famine, those victims who had died near a Cillin...
It wasn't because the Famine victims were denied a Catholic burial...it was because there were too few able bodied people left to carry them as far as the consecrated ground. And this is the point where I'm going to digress completely and tell you about a man who once sent me a letter...
This old gentleman was eighty-nine when he wrote to me...he printed his words out carefully in uppercase lettering on a piece of lined paper...he could clearly recall his Grandfather telling of his childhood, when he met with a man who used to walk the lanes every day gathering up the corpses of those who'd died in the night...he had a stout piece of canvas and he'd roll the body into the cloth and then heave it up onto his shoulder to carry it to the Cillin in his parish...his brother dug the graves...they'd work all the day long and then go to the nearest soup station at the side of the road for a scoop of whatever was passing as food. The brother died of typhus...the man who gathered the corpses lived a long life.
So the Cillins are the resting place of many...'our' Cillin has been estimated to hold around seven hundred people according to the man who is Irelands expert on burial grounds of all types...the last known burial of a baby was in 1964.
Some areas have had the local priest carry out a blessing on the Cillin...then perhaps a bench is placed so visitors can sit for a while and remember their brothers and sisters or their own babies...many have planted roses...one priest I met had encouraged his parishioners to give names to the babies...Father Paddy introduced me to two old chaps whose baby sisters had been buried in a Cillin...and did you put names on them I asked...and they went a bit pink and said they'd named them Mary and Margaret...
Father Paddy was quite, quite mad...he drove his powerful car extremely fast and played loud rock
music and wore proper hob-nailed boots and I fell in love with him instantly as he ranted about St Augustine and his dreadful legacy...RIP to my dearly loved friend...may the Angels guard you with love.
After getting to know Father Paddy, I thought I'd ask the Bishop if he'd bless 'our' Cillin...I gathered a few people together and away we went to the Bishops Palace and perched on uncomfortable chairs in a rather grand sort of room and he knocked us for six, the miserable old goat,...all in the past he said...don't need to stir up memories he said...then he fixed me with a beady eye and said it was all Cromwell's fault...never met him Your Grace, I said...before my time actually. Can't avoid being Anglo-Irish, I said...not my fault...
Then he changed the subject and asked would I ever catch all the feral cats his housekeeper insists on feeding at the back door...how many cats would there be Your Grace? About twenty he replied...we'll ask for a donation, I said, towards the cost of neutering and spaying...I was lying in my teeth 'cos we'd do no such thing.
Huh...said the Bishop, and escorted our little group out.
Minding The Children...
The old priest
The Pastors Ass.
