Paper short abstract:

This paper is an investigation of contemporary trends in the memorialisation of infants who died around the time of birth and some of the ways parents use (manipulation of material culture and landscape in particular) to cope with such loss within the context of Irish cultural history.

Paper long abstract:

Encounters with death are moments of cultural and psychological adjustment and are often marked on landscapes. In this paper, I explore one particular and striking example of this: the death of infants. When a child dies parents adjust to loss, including the unfulfilled potential of a life that was not lived. Thus, there is a temporal problem marked by a lack of shared memories, which parents attempt to resolve. The problem, if not the resolution, is often articulated through objects and the cemetery landscape itself. The example that I employ is Dublin's Glasnevin National Cemetery. I set contemporary trends in memorialisation to the backdrop of Irish cultural history: a history encompassing the exclusion of the unbaptized and "illegitimate", of disciplinary regulation of the cemetery landscape and, more recently, the accumulation of material culture and the elaboration of visiting rituals.

Today, parents bring gifts to the Angels' plot—as the area dedicated to children is known—often on occasions in which the children would have received them had they been alive. Children's spirits are imagined to grow, play together and keep company with each other. The landscape is alive in the temporal imagination, as reflected in hundreds of wind chimes and windmills left by visitors that animate the otherwise-still landscape with movement and sounds.