Graveyard, Grange, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Burial Grounds
At Grange in County Kildare, within the remains of an old ecclesiastical enclosure, there is a graveyard where, by long tradition, only children were buried. Such places, sometimes called cillíní or killeens, were common across Ireland for centuries, used for the interment of unbaptised infants or young children who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. This particular site carries its own name, Cill Domhnaill, suggesting a dedication to a figure named Domhnall and pointing to origins that likely predate any formal record of the place.
The graveyard does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which makes it easy to overlook in historical terms, yet it was noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters as an old burial ground where children only were interred. That description, recorded by Herity in 2002 drawing on earlier survey material, captures something of the quiet, particular function this ground served in the community. A single headstone survives, probably dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, now standing illegible inside the shell of a ruined church. Whatever names or dates it once carried have been worn away, leaving a marker that gestures at a burial record without actually providing one.