Children's burial ground, Kilduff, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kilduff, Co. Kerry

On a steep hillside in the Kerry mountains, bounded by walls that look no different from the ordinary field boundaries around them, lies a small rectangular enclosure with a particular and melancholy purpose.

Known in Irish as Cill Dubh, meaning dark or black church, it is what was once called a cillin, a type of informal burial ground used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated churchyard burial under Catholic practice. The walls give nothing away; only the context explains what the ground once held.

The site sits at the head of an east-west valley on a south-south-westward facing slope, positioned between Flemingstown mountain and the central mountain range of the Dingle Peninsula. Internally it measures roughly 33 metres east to west and approximately 28 metres north to south. The surface inside is uneven, with mounds and terraces, though these appear to be natural features of the sloping ground rather than grave markers or deliberate earthworks. Drystone construction, the traditional method of building walls using carefully fitted unmortared stones, was used throughout, and the boundary walls are indistinguishable in technique from the field walls that surround the enclosure on all sides. What makes Cill Dubh historically notable is the evidence that children were still being brought here for burial as late as the nineteenth century, suggesting the site remained in active use long after similar places elsewhere had fallen out of practice.

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