Children's burial ground, An Mhuiríoch, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a slope of pasture overlooking the estuary of the Inny river in An Mhuiríoch, County Kerry, there is a low stony platform that does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, yet has a name that carries centuries of quiet significance.
Locally it is called a ceallúnach, a term used across Ireland for informal burial grounds set apart from consecrated churchyards, most often associated with unbaptised infants, who under Catholic tradition were long denied burial in hallowed ground. The place sits close to a field boundary, unremarkable to a passing eye, its slight rise above the surrounding pasture the only hint that the ground beneath has been treated with particular care.
The platform is subrectangular in shape, measuring roughly 17 metres by 19 metres and rising to about 0.4 metres at its highest point. Its surface is uneven, scattered with small boulders and a number of upright grave-markers, none of them inscribed. No name, date, or identity is recorded in stone. The site does not appear to have been used within living memory as a place of interment, though local tradition holds that two sailors were buried here during the nineteenth century, an unusual detail that hints at how these marginal grounds could absorb other deaths that, for one reason or another, fell outside ordinary parish burial. The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the wider mapping of Ireland, refer to the site under the placename Drummod, confirming that the ceallúnach was a recognised feature of the local landscape even then, even if it never made it onto the maps themselves.