Children's burial ground, Ceann Eich, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ceann Eich, Co. Kerry

At the edge of a rough pasture in Ceann Eich, overlooking the estuary of the Inny river, lies a small oval enclosure that served for generations as a burial place for unbaptised children.

These sites, known in Irish as cilliní, existed across the country as a quiet answer to a painful theology: Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised infants could not be interred in consecrated ground, and so communities found their own places, at field margins and liminal boundaries, to bury the very young. This particular ground measures roughly 29 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, its eastern and southern edges still traced by a low earth and stone bank, now much degraded, that rises little more than half a metre above the grass.

The interior slopes southward, and it is toward that lower end that most of the grave-markers are gathered. Many have fallen and lie flat, but those still upright tend to follow a north to south alignment. At the centre of the enclosure stands a leacht, a low commemorative cairn or altar-like structure built from coursed drystone masonry and distinguished by a considerable quantity of quartz stones worked into its fabric. Quartz appears frequently at Irish sacred and burial sites across many centuries, its bright, almost luminous quality evidently carrying some significance that has not been entirely explained. The leacht here is rectangular, just over three metres by two and a half, and a loose mound of stones sits nearby to its south-east. A large prostrate slab, measuring 1.6 metres in length, lies close to the south-eastern edge of the site. Local tradition records that children were still being brought here for burial in the early twentieth century, which gives the ground a continuity of use stretching well beyond the medieval period into living memory.

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