Children's burial ground, Inchee, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Inchee, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Trusk mountain in South Kerry, four flat slabs lie on the ground with no inscription, no name, and no clear indication of who, if anyone, rests beneath them.

This is Calluragh, a site classified as a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a type of unconsecrated ground where unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal churchyard burial were laid to rest, often quietly and without ceremony. The practice was widespread across rural Ireland for centuries, and such sites tend to be easy to overlook, their markers minimal or absent by design as much as by time.

The site has a layered and slightly confusing history on the ground. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded it as a clearly defined oval feature, but by the second edition it had been reduced to a cautionary "site of", suggesting the physical evidence had already become ambiguous or disturbed. What now occupies the location is a pound, a small enclosure historically used to impound stray livestock, roughly circular with an internal diameter of about 3.4 metres, sitting in rough pasture above the Finglas river. Traces of an earlier structure seem to survive beneath the pound's northern and eastern walls, hinting that the enclosure was built over, or partly reusing, whatever originally defined the burial ground. The four recumbent slabs lie to the southwest of the pound, unadorned and unattributed.

The site overlooks the Finglas river from the north and east, on fairly steep terrain. Anyone visiting would find a landscape where the agricultural and the funerary have become practically indistinguishable, the pound walls possibly incorporating the bones of an older boundary, and the slabs nearby offering little to read beyond their presence.

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