Children's burial ground, Collorus, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Collorus, Co. Kerry

A triangular field of roughly forty metres by twenty-five, narrowing to a point at the north, covered in ferns, with an uneven surface and almost nothing to mark what lies beneath it.

Only a single flat stone, embedded near the centre, hints that this unremarkable-looking patch of pasture on a north-facing slope above Ardgroom Harbour in County Kerry is, in fact, a burial ground.

The site is known locally as a cillíneach, the Irish term for a children's burial ground of a particular and quietly melancholy kind. These were places set aside, from medieval times and into the twentieth century, for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were denied burial in consecrated ground under Catholic doctrine. Because baptism was considered necessary for salvation, children who died before it could be administered occupied an uncertain spiritual category, and so they were laid to rest in marginal spaces: old ringforts, the boundaries of townlands, shorelines, or fields like this one overlooking the harbour. The absence of grave-markers is typical. Families buried their children here without ceremony, and the land has largely absorbed the evidence, leaving the ferns and the uneven ground as the only outward signs of what occurred.

The Collorus cillíneach sits in undulating pasture with a view south-west towards Ardgroom Harbour, a quietly remote spot on the Beara Peninsula. The single embedded flat stone near the centre of the field is the only feature that distinguishes the ground from the surrounding farmland, and a visitor approaching without prior knowledge would have little reason to pause.

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Pete F
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