Children's burial ground, Annadale, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Annadale, Co. Kerry

Beneath a working farmyard near the confluence of the Cottoners and Laune rivers in County Kerry, there is a burial ground that has effectively ceased to exist as a visible place.

Farm buildings now cover the site, and the ground gives little away. What was once recorded as a small rectangular enclosure on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map had, by the second edition, been reduced to a notation: "site of". The enclosure itself had gone.

The site belongs to a category of burial ground known in Ireland as a killeen, sometimes spelled cillin, a word derived from the Irish for a small church or cell. These were places set aside, usually informally and often at the margins of parish land, for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. The custom was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and killeens are found in many counties, frequently in out-of-the-way locations: beside old boundaries, near water, or on land with some earlier sacred association. This particular example near Annadale was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as a children's burial ground, which places it squarely within that tradition. The detail about its position just south of the river confluence is a small but telling one; liminal spots, places where water meets or land changes character, recur with some regularity in the siting of these grounds.

By the time archaeologists working on the Iveragh Peninsula survey documented the site in the 1990s, drawing on the earlier OS record, physical evidence above ground had already been lost to the farm. It survives now only in cartographic memory and in the name attached to the place, which is itself a form of preservation, however incomplete.

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Pete F
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