Children's burial ground, Doire Mhór Thiar, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Doire Mhór Thiar, Co. Kerry

Within fifty metres of the water at the base of Derrymore island, a low spit of land pushing northward into Tralee Bay, there is a long narrow enclosure that was once used for burying children.

Known as Killeenloumluskaun, or Tor an Chilliní in Irish, it belongs to a category of burial ground found throughout Ireland called a cillín, a place set apart from consecrated ground where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others excluded from Catholic burial rites, were interred. The practice was widespread for centuries, and these sites tend to sit at the margins, literally and figuratively, of the communities that used them.

The enclosure is sub-oval in plan, stretching roughly 54 metres east to west and reaching no more than 12.5 metres across at its widest point. A low bank, rising to just under a metre, curves along the southern side and nearly meets the road boundary fence to the north. A few stones are visible on the surface of this bank, though an earlier description recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books referred to it as a mound of small stones, which does not match what can be seen today. The interior has been divided by a later field wall running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, and the eastern end of the enclosure appears to have been cut back at some point in modern times; the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map shows it extending considerably further east than it now does. Children were still being brought here for burial in the early nineteenth century, which gives some sense of how long these quiet, liminal spaces remained in use even as formal church burial became the norm.

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