Children's burial ground, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

A small rectangular platform of raised earth, barely a metre above the surrounding field, holds a particular kind of silence.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants, those who died before they could receive the rites of the Catholic Church and so, under the theology of the time, could not be interred in consecrated ground. The one at Clochán Na Nuagh sits in farmland overlooking Ballinskelligs Bay in south Kerry, modest in scale at roughly 8.5 metres north to south and 6.5 metres east to west, but carrying the weight of a practice that was once widespread across rural Ireland and is only now being fully acknowledged.

The site was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, where it appeared in the south-west corner of what was then a single large field. By the late nineteenth century the surrounding land had been divided into a series of smaller fields, which altered the spatial relationship between the platform and its immediate landscape. The structure itself has a rough revetment, with four stone slabs supporting the southern face of the raised area, and the upper surface is scattered with loose stone and a number of upright grave-markers. Two larger slabs, each averaging around a metre in height and sixty centimetres in width, stand toward the southern end of the platform. These uprights, uncut and unlabelled, are the only monuments to the children interred here, their anonymity less a statement of neglect than a reflection of the furtive, sorrowful circumstances in which such burials were typically carried out, often at night, by grieving families who had nowhere else to turn.

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