Children's burial ground, Cill Mhic Iarainn Thiar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On the south-eastern spur of Beenduff, above the Inny river valley and its estuary, lies a roughly twelve-metre square platform enclosed by low stony banks.
Inside, up to 150 uninscribed grave-markers press up through dense overgrowth. No names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. This is a cillín, a children's burial ground of the kind found scattered across Ireland, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often on the margins of parish territories, beside ancient boundaries, or on liminal ground between the human and the wild.
The site sits at Cill Mhic Iarainn Thiar on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, part of a landscape that has been surveyed in detail by archaeologists working across south Kerry. The platform itself is clearly defined, with the stony banks on the southern, downslope side rising to around 1.15 metres above the surrounding ground, while the upslope northern bank stands considerably lower at about half a metre. A modern field boundary cuts across the western edge of the site, a reminder that agricultural life has continued around and through these places without much ceremony. The interior is heavily overgrown, which is typical of cillíní; they were rarely maintained in the conventional sense, occupying an ambiguous place in local memory, acknowledged but not quite spoken of.
The view from this spot, out over the Inny valley and its estuary to the south-west, gives some sense of why such places were chosen. Whether by intention or practical necessity, cillíní were rarely invisible. They tend to occupy ground that is visually prominent even as they remain socially peripheral, known to local families but absent from official maps and parish records. The uninscribed stones here mark lives that were similarly unrecorded.