Children's burial ground, Baslickane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
At Baslickane in County Kerry, a roughly sixteen-metre-square patch of ground holds a quiet and largely overlooked kind of burial place.
Dozens of small stones, none of them bearing any inscription, rise an average of about forty centimetres from the earth, packed closely together across the interior of an enclosure. The absence of names is not neglect; it is the defining feature of a cillin, the informal burial grounds found across Ireland where unbaptised children, and sometimes others excluded from consecrated ground, were interred outside the formal structures of the Church.
Sites like this one were rarely documented with any urgency, and the record at Baslickane is spare. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh peninsula, compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, notes the dense concentration of markers and the scale of the enclosure, but little else is recoverable about when the ground came into use or over what period families carried their children here. The plain, low stones were never meant to identify individuals; their purpose was simply to mark that the ground was occupied, that something lay beneath. Across Ireland, cillini tend to cluster near early ecclesiastical sites, boundary ditches, or liminal landscape features, places understood to sit at the edge of ordinary community space, and Baslickane fits quietly within that pattern.