Children's burial ground, Ballymanagh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballymanagh, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of Coombe Hill, on Valentia Island, a slightly raised patch of ground in the corner of a field holds around eighty small upright stones.

Most are modest in size, averaging roughly thirty-five centimetres high, and they are arranged in quiet north-south rows. A few are paired, with a flat slab lying between them. There is no church nearby, no formal gateway, and nothing to signal from a distance what the place is. This is a cillín, a type of informal burial ground used in Ireland for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic Church practice, could not be buried in consecrated ground. The Church taught that those who died without baptism were excluded from heaven, and so communities created their own spaces at the margins, often at field boundaries, on liminal ground between townlands, or near ancient monuments.

This particular site sits in the south-west corner of a field, hard against the townland boundary to the west, overlooking the Portmagee Channel and the Kerry mainland beyond. The enclosure measures roughly thirteen metres north to south and twelve and a half metres east to west, and rises no more than sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground, its form defined by a low platform of earth and stone. A stony bank about seven and a half metres long crosses the site near its northern edge, and just outside the south-east corner sits an irregular stony mound measuring three metres by two and a half. Among the grave-markers, a number of quartz blocks are scattered across the surface, their pale colour possibly deliberate. Quartz has carried associations with the dead and the otherworldly in Irish tradition since at least the Neolithic period, appearing prominently at passage tombs and early Christian burial sites alike.

The site is tucked into the field corner rather than announced in the landscape, which is typical of these places. Visitors who do seek it out should be aware that cillíní remain sensitive ground, still connected to living family memory in many rural communities, and that the grave-markers, however weathered, represent real burials. The view south across the channel is wide and clear, and the quiet of the location has something to do with its position at the very edge of things, both geographically and historically.

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