Children's burial ground, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

On the south bank of the Inny river in County Kerry, a semicircular patch of overgrown pasture holds up to a hundred uninscribed grave-markers, most of them clustered in the eastern half of the enclosure.

No names, no dates, no epitaphs. This is Gortakilleen, a children's burial ground of the kind once found across Ireland, where unbaptised infants and young children were interred apart from consecrated ground. The Catholic Church's theological position on the unbaptised excluded them from parish graveyards, and so communities set aside their own quiet margins, places that existed outside the official geography of death but were maintained with real care.

The enclosure is roughly 27 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west. Its northern boundary is formed not by a wall or ditch but by the river's own meander scarp, a two-metre drop where the Inny has cut into the bank over centuries. Elsewhere, a gapped earthen bank, averaging 1.2 metres in height and 1.8 metres wide, completes the boundary. Within the enclosure there were once two stone-lined wells, and an old tree at the southern end; together with the wells, the tree served as focal points for a pattern, a traditional local devotional gathering, held here on Good Fridays until at least the 1950s. A 1939 report in The Kerryman by a writer named O'Connell described a particularly fine gullane at the site, known locally as a font. A gullane, sometimes called a bullaun stone, is a large stone with one or more cup-shaped hollows, often associated with holy wells and early Christian sites; the water that collects in the hollow was frequently regarded as having healing properties. That feature is no longer visible and may have been lost or buried since O'Connell's time.

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