Children's burial ground, Cloontubbrid, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloontubbrid, Co. Kerry

In a field in Cloontubbrid, in north County Kerry, a low earthen mound sits barely half a metre above the surrounding ground.

It is unassuming to the point of near-invisibility, yet it marks one of the more quietly solemn categories of place in the Irish landscape: a killeen, a burial ground reserved for children who died unbaptised and were therefore, under Catholic doctrine, excluded from consecrated ground.

The mound is sub-rectangular in shape, measuring roughly 17.8 metres long and 4.6 metres wide, with a considerable scattering of stones still visible across its surface. Its existence as a killeen was already being recorded cartographically by the time of the Ordnance Survey mapping of 1841 to 1842, which means it was a recognised, named feature of the local landscape well before that. Killeens, sometimes also called cillíní, were typically located at the edges of townlands, near old field boundaries, or on marginal ground; places set apart from the main rhythms of parish life. The stones visible here may represent the remains of simple grave markers, though the mound itself is the only substantial feature that survives.

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