Children's burial ground, Cill Ón Chatha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
Absent from Ordnance Survey maps and easy to overlook in the sloping pasture above St Finan's Bay, this small enclosure on the Iveragh Peninsula is one of those places that exists primarily in local memory.
It is known locally as a ceallúnach, a term used in Irish for unconsecrated burial grounds where unbaptised children were laid to rest, often at the margins of parishes and the edges of official religious practice. What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is that devotional rounds, the traditional circular prayer-walks performed at sacred sites, were still being carried out here as recently as the first half of the twentieth century.
The enclosure is sub-rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 13 by 10 metres internally. Its south-east side follows the line of a low natural cliff, with remnants of drystone walling along the upper edge; everywhere else, an overgrown stony bank defines the boundary. Two upright stones on the west side, standing about 3.5 metres apart, may once have marked an entrance. Inside, the ground is thickly scattered with stone and quartz, and the grave-markers are mostly small rounded boulders rather than inscribed slabs, a material vocabulary that speaks to the informal, unofficial nature of such burials. In the raised northern section of the interior there is a more deliberate structure: a slab-lined rectangular platform incorporating a good deal of quartz, retained on its south side by a double row of slabs and preserving the remains of a coursed step. This is described as leacht-like, a leacht being a low commemorative or devotional cairn of stones associated with early Irish religious sites, often used as a focus for prayer or penitential exercise. The presence of such a feature here, alongside the tradition of rounds, suggests this ceallúnach occupied a more complex place in local devotion than simple exclusion from the consecrated ground of the parish church would imply.