Children's burial ground, An Tseantóir, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, An Tseantóir, Co. Kerry

A small circular burial ground on the Dingle Peninsula, no more than six metres across, carries an improbable tangle of identities.

It is classified as a calluragh, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground typically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from Christian churchyards, yet the grave at its centre has attracted traditions far grander and stranger than that modest function might suggest. By the early nineteenth century the site had no settled local name, which is itself unusual for a place that seems to have mattered to people across several centuries.

The grave itself is a leacht, a term for a low rectangular mound of the kind sometimes associated with early Christian commemoration, here measuring roughly 5.7 metres north to south and 4 metres east to west, with large prostrate slabs laid across its surface. Two standing stones mark the mound near its northwest and southeast ends. The taller of the two, at the southeast, stands 1.25 metres high and carries carving on both faces: a simple cross with slightly expanded terminals on the east face, and faint linear markings on the west. In the nineteenth century a second inscribed stone also lay loose nearby, a roughly circular piece bearing a Maltese cross within a circle, recorded by the antiquarian Du Noyer in his Antiquarian Sketches. Writing in 1939, the scholar known as An Seabhac recorded the names Uaigh Mhóire and Teampall Mhóire for the spot, connecting it to the burial place of the goddess Mór. A competing tradition, noted by O'Sullivan in 1931, holds that the grave belongs to the Prince d'Ascoli, son of Philip of Spain, who drowned when the Santa Maria de la Rosa was wrecked in the Blasket Sound in 1588, one of the ships of the Spanish Armada lost along that coast. The townland boundary between Vicarstown and Glebe, which otherwise follows a nearby stream, takes a deliberate southward kink to place the calluragh within Vicarstown, a small geographical anomaly that hints at the site's local significance. A curved section of boundary wall to the east may mark the remains of a clochán, a dry-stone beehive hut of early medieval type, adding one more quiet layer to what the ground here contains.

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