Children's burial ground, Bailín, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In elevated pasture on the Iveragh Peninsula, a roughly rectangular patch of ground sits unrecorded on any Ordnance Survey map, known locally only as a burial ground.
Sites like this, scattered across Ireland and commonly called cilliní, were where unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground were laid to rest, often quietly and without formal ceremony. The absence of official cartographic recognition at Bailín is itself telling: these places existed outside the structures of the institutional church, and so they tended to exist outside official record-keeping too.
The site occupies the north-west corner of a field, bounded on its northern edge by a stream and elsewhere by field walls, and its footprint is considerable, measuring roughly 9.25 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. Several upright stone slabs stand in the interior. The largest, positioned towards the south, measures approximately 1.2 metres tall and nearly a metre wide, and carries two solution pits near its base, small natural hollows formed by the slow chemical weathering of stone over time. A second slab of comparable size stands some 10 metres to the east. A large shallow depression in the south-east sector, measuring around 7 by 4.6 metres, has been noted but its meaning remains uncertain. The most direct evidence of the site's use came during land improvement works in the area, when a number of bones were uncovered and subsequently reburied on site.
The place leaves more questions than answers. No excavation appears to have been carried out, and the depression in the south-east corner invites speculation without resolution. What is clear is that the community knew this ground mattered, even without a formal marker on any map, and that when the bones were disturbed, they were treated with care enough to be returned to the earth.