Children's burial ground, Baslickane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Baslickane, Co. Kerry

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.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Children’s burial ground, Baslickane, Co. Kerry. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement