Children's burial ground, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

In a roughly rectangular field in Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a scatter of loose stones is just about all that survives of a place once known as An Reilig or An Cheallúnach.

The second of those names points to its particular character: a cillín, or children's burial ground, one of the many informal, unconsecrated sites found across Ireland where unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial were laid to rest, quietly and without ceremony, for centuries.

The site was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as a circular enclosure roughly sixty metres in diameter, with numerous old graves and headstones still visible in the interior. Even then it was disused, and by the time the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map was produced it had been reduced to a marked absence, noted only as a site of something former. A 1946 account recorded that several cist graves, a form of burial in which the body is placed within a box-like setting of stone slabs, were still discernible as mounds of stone enclosed by standing stones. According to a tradition recorded by the writer and folklorist known as An Seabhac in 1939, a church once stood here too, which would place the site within a longer continuum of sacred use stretching back well before the cillín practice became widespread in the post-medieval period.

Today, nothing of that layered history announces itself from the outside. The standing stones are gone, the headstones are gone, and what remains is the kind of unremarkable field boundary and stone scatter that the eye tends to pass over without registering. It is the sort of place that repays knowing something about it before you arrive, because the landscape itself will not explain what happened there.

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