Children's burial ground, Bailín, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Bailín, Co. Kerry

In the pasture land of Beenarourke on the Iveragh Peninsula, just south of a small river that drains into Ballinskelligs Bay, there is a burial ground that had already fallen out of use before the end of the nineteenth century.

Known as a cillin, a type of unconsecrated ground where unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Catholic burial were interred, the site sits quietly in grassland, its rectangular enclosure measuring roughly twelve metres north to south and just over twenty-one metres east to west. The interior is raised between seventy centimetres and one and a half metres above the surrounding ground level, a subtle elevation that still sets it apart from the ordinary field around it.

The enclosure is defined on its north and west sides by a ruined drystone wall, built with large external slabs and a more regularly coursed inner face, a construction technique that suggests some care was taken in its original making. On the east and south sides, large boulders serve as boundaries, though these appear to be the product of agricultural field clearance rather than deliberate construction. An entrance survives at the east end, about a metre wide and marked by two upright slabs standing roughly ninety centimetres high, with a third slab fallen to the north. Two small grave-markers, each around sixty centimetres tall, stand inside near the eastern edge. Scattered across the grass-covered surface is loose stone, including a notable quantity of quartz, a material associated in Irish folk tradition with the marking and protection of burial sites. Midway along the southern wall there is a stone-lined circular depression about ninety centimetres across, filled with collapsed material; its original purpose remains unclear.

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