Children's burial ground, Derreennamucklagh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Derreennamucklagh, Co. Kerry

On the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan for this part of County Kerry, a small site near Derreennamucklagh is marked with the word "Kieleen", a phonetic rendering of the Irish "cillín", the term used for an unconsecrated burial ground reserved for unbaptised infants.

These sites are found across Ireland in their hundreds, tucked into field corners, beside ringforts, or at the margins of townlands, and they speak to a practice that persisted well into the twentieth century. Because the Catholic Church held that unbaptised children could not be buried in consecrated ground, families interred them quietly in these liminal places, often at night and without ceremony. The grief was real; the burial was not.

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