Children's burial ground, Kilcock, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a piece of rising ground in north Kerry, there is an enclosure that the Ordnance Survey mapmakers of 1841 to 1842 labelled plainly and without ceremony: "Burial Ground for Children.
" That label points to a cillín, the informal name for the category of marginal burial sites used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic doctrine of the period, were excluded from consecrated ground. These places were often located at liminal spots, old boundaries, or elevated land set apart from the parish churchyard, and they carry a particular weight in the Irish landscape.
What makes this site in Kilcock quietly arresting is the gap between how it was recorded and how it now appears. The mid-nineteenth-century map shows a neat circular form, but on the ground today the enclosure is irregularly shaped, sloping considerably to the east and south so that the interior sits noticeably lower than the surrounding terrain. It measures roughly 40 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west on the interior, with the outer dimensions running to 45 metres by 39 metres. In the north-western part of the interior there is a small mound, approximately 4 metres square, whose purpose is unrecorded. A probable entrance around 4 metres wide opens to the east. Whether the change in shape reflects centuries of gradual alteration, slippage, or simply the limits of early cartographic precision is not clear from what survives.