Children's burial ground, Kyle, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kyle, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a modern bungalow's garden fence and the pasture that rolls away from it in County Tipperary, unbaptised and stillborn children were once quietly buried, in ground that had already been set apart for them long before anyone thought to write it down.

There are no headstones here, no grave markers of any kind visible above the surface. What remains is a low natural hillock, a slight drop in the earth running roughly northwest to southeast, and a small grove of trees planted, according to the landowner, directly over where the church and graveyard once stood.

The site sits alongside the ruins of a medieval church at Kyle, and the two were closely connected. By 1840, when surveyors were compiling their Ordnance Survey letters for the area, the graveyard had already narrowed in its purpose: the record states that it was 'but a small one and now used for the interment of stillborn children only'. This practice was bound up with Catholic teaching of the period, which held that infants who died without baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground. Separate plots, often old or liminal spaces on the margins of parishes, were used instead. These places are known in Irish as cilliní, and they appear quietly across the landscape in their hundreds. By 1892, a local account by White noted that even this reduced use seemed to have lapsed entirely, the bounds of the church and churchyard still traceable then but the whole site given over to grazing cattle. The boundary fence of the present bungalow appears to run directly across where the church once stood, and a scarp of about thirty centimetres, some twenty metres to the south of that fence, may be all that survives of the graveyard's western wall.

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