Children's burial ground, Kealariddig, Co. Kerry

No stone, no hollow, no mark in the grass betrays what was once recorded here: a killeen, the Irish term for an unconsecrated children's burial ground, where infants who died before baptism were quietly interred apart from the main parish cemetery. These sites were once found across rural Ireland, their circular forms often the only visible clue to their purpose, and their use persisted well into the nineteenth century in many communities.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded this particular killeen as a circular area on the summit of that low rise, a modest but deliberate shape that reflects the form these sites commonly took. By the time the second edition was surveyed, the cartographers could only note it as a "site of", meaning the ground had already been disturbed or levelled. According to a record from 1896, the site had been cleared by that point and the land returned to agricultural use. The Ardsheelhane river runs a short distance to the west. That is, effectively, all that is known.

What makes this place notable is precisely its absence. The killeen at Kealariddig belongs to a broader landscape of deliberate forgetting, where the grief of parents who lost unbaptised children was absorbed into the margins of the land rather than memorialised. The Ordnance Survey caught it at the moment of its erasure, marking first its presence and then, a generation later, only the memory of one.