Children's burial ground, Cill An Urdráin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cill An Urdráin, Co. Kerry

On a north-north-westward facing slope above Brandon Bay in County Kerry, there once lay a small, mounded enclosure that served for centuries as a calluragh, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised children and others excluded from the rites of the established Church.

These sites, found throughout Ireland, occupy a peculiar place between the sacred and the marginal, neither fully outside the community nor fully within its spiritual protection. This one was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as roughly circular in outline, though a more detailed early survey described it as an elongated mound measuring approximately 15 metres long, 4.5 metres wide, and 1.2 metres high, modest dimensions for a place that would have absorbed generations of quiet grief.

The site carries the name An Chill, meaning the church, and local oral tradition held that an earlier ecclesiastical building once stood here, from which the surrounding townland took its name. The association between early Christian church sites and later calluragh burials is not unusual in Ireland; communities sometimes continued burying in or near old sanctified ground long after any structure had vanished, finding a kind of informal consecration in the memory of what had been there before. Whether or not an actual church ever stood at this particular spot, the placename and the burial ground together point to a landscape that was understood as having religious significance over a long period. That continuity was broken abruptly in 1982, when the field containing the site was cleared and deep-ploughed, an act of agricultural improvement that would have disturbed or destroyed much of whatever physical evidence remained. The site is documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, compiled for Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, which preserves the earlier Ordnance Survey descriptions alongside later observations.

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