Children's burial ground, Gortshanavogh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Gortshanavogh, Co. Kerry

On the grounds of Kerry Airport, in what was once open pasture, lies a small earthwork that local memory identifies as a children's burial ground.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used from the medieval period well into the nineteenth century to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. They were rarely marked with anything elaborate, and many have vanished entirely into the landscape. This one, at Gortshanavogh, has barely survived.

The site first appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, marked as a roughly circular area of approximately twenty metres in diameter. By the time the 1897 revision was made, only a single tree indicated its position. When surveyed by O'Hare in 1997, the remains had been largely levelled, leaving a roughly rectangular earthwork measuring about 19.5 metres north to south and 11.5 metres east to west, defined by a very low rise just ten centimetres above the interior ground level and twenty centimetres above the exterior. Hawthorn bushes, a species long associated with liminal and sacred ground in Irish tradition, grew just outside the north-east edge. Inside the northern part of the enclosure, a short line of low stones extending roughly 1.65 metres in a north-south direction was still visible. Local informants told O'Hare that rows of similar stones had once been more numerous across the site, and were understood to have served as grave-markers for children buried there.

The survival of even these scant traces, within the operational grounds of a working airport, gives the site an incongruous quality. The enclosure has been flattened over time, its circular outline softened into something barely legible, and yet the low rise, the hawthorn, and those few remaining stones are enough to indicate that this was once a place set apart, maintained in local memory even as its physical form slowly disappeared.

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