Children's burial ground, Cloonee, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a low knoll in rough pasture on a ridge near Cloonee in south-west Kerry, a small circular enclosure holds a collection of low, uninscribed stone slabs.
There are no names here, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. The slabs are orientated north to south, and the ground inside the enclosure sits slightly higher than the surrounding land, defined by a stone-faced scarp. Trees grow around the perimeter. It is, in its quiet way, a place that has absorbed something and given nothing back in words.
This is almost certainly a cillín, sometimes rendered as cilleanach in older Irish sources, a type of unconsecrated burial ground used across Ireland for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, along with others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. These sites occupy a peculiar position in Irish religious and social history; they existed outside the formal structures of the Church, yet were maintained with evident care by local communities. The site at Cloonee, measuring roughly nine metres north to south and eight and a half metres east to west, was recorded in the 1930s by Captain D. B. O'Connell, who noted it in the Clonee townland and stated that he had never seen it used. By the time he encountered it, the practice of burying children in such places was already fading, though the sites themselves persisted in the landscape, unremarked and largely unvisited.