Children's burial ground, Curra, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Curra, Co. Kerry

Tucked between the Behy river and the edge of Curra Wood on the Iveragh Peninsula, this small burial ground holds roughly a hundred upright stone slabs, none of them inscribed.

The markers average about thirty centimetres high, arranged in rows running roughly northwest to southeast across an overgrown platform of ground that sits nearly a metre above the surrounding pasture. That slight elevation, so easy to miss in a narrow strip of grassland, is itself a kind of signal: raised ground at Irish burial sites of this type often reflects centuries of accumulation rather than deliberate construction.

The site was originally recorded as an unenclosed children's burial ground, a cillín in Irish tradition. Cilliní were informal plots used across Ireland for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground, including stillborn children, and sometimes adults who died outside the Church's rites. They were typically unmarked in any official sense, situated at liminal spots such as field boundaries, ancient earthworks, or riverbanks, and often went unacknowledged in the documentary record. What makes this site unusual is that it appears to have crossed over: despite its origins as an unenclosed cillín, it was used as a formal graveyard for at least part of the twentieth century. The more recent grave-markers in the southern portion of the site reflect that later, more conventional use. At the northern end, a small slab carries a plain Latin cross on its northeast face, the only decorated stone among the hundred or so present. The central overgrown area, shaded by holly and ash, measures twenty-eight metres north to south and twenty-seven metres east to west, its uneven surface suggesting a long and layered history of use.

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Pete F
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