Children's burial ground, An Cillín Liath, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, An Cillín Liath, Co. Kerry

On the south bank of the River Inny, northwest of Killeenleagh Bridge on the Iveragh Peninsula, there is a place where unbaptised children were once quietly buried apart from consecrated ground.

Known locally as Pairc an Chillín, the site centres on a ceallúnach, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground associated with infants and others excluded from formal Christian burial. This one is a heavily overgrown raised area, roughly rectangular, measuring 18 metres by 10 metres, and still crowded with uninscribed grave-markers. A low scarp defines its southwestern edge. On the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a curving field boundary of around 50 metres in diameter is shown enclosing the site from north through east to south, and this may preserve the outline of a much earlier enclosure.

A short distance to the west stands something stranger still: a low, sub-circular cairn about a metre high, upon which rests an ogham stone. Ogham is an early medieval script carved as a series of notches along the edge of a stone, mostly used for personal names and genealogies, and the inscription here reads DOVATTAC AV(I]...ILEH, though the text is damaged by spalling and the roughness of the quartz surface has made parts of it difficult to read. The stone itself stands 1.45 metres tall, inclines noticeably to the south, and carries something additional on its upper face: a neatly incised, encircled Maltese cross. The circle is not quite perfectly drawn, and the cross arms are unevenly recessed, throwing four truncated petal shapes into relief around them. There is also a small curve extending from the upper arm of the cross that may, if it is not simply a natural feature of the stone, represent the rho element of the chi-rho symbol, the early Christian monogram combining the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek. The cairn itself carries a local tradition recorded in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection: it is reputed to mark the grave of a figure known as Liar Dearg.

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