Children's burial ground, Coomduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a walled enclosure that once served as a children's burial ground, a category of site known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often in places already considered liminal or ancient.
The site at Coomduff is modest in scale, roughly 26.5 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, but its stony interior carries the particular kind of weight that comes from long, unofficial use.
The ground inside is considerably disturbed, which is not unusual for sites of this kind. Cillíní were rarely maintained in any formal sense; they accumulated burials over generations, often without markers, and were shaped more by local custom than by any institutional record-keeping. At Coomduff, one upright slab survives in the interior, and local information suggests it may relate to the burial ground's period of use. Whether it served as a grave marker or had some other function is not certain. The site was documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which remains one of the more thorough regional surveys of its kind in Ireland.
Visitor Notes
Added by
