Children's burial ground, Drommartin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In a corner of a field in Drommartin, north County Kerry, there is a place that no longer exists in any visible sense, yet was considered significant enough to be named and mapped twice over.
Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded it as a children's burial ground on their sheets of 1841 to 1842, and the designation was carried forward again on the 1916 revision, as if those responsible for the maps felt it deserved continued acknowledgement. By the time anyone thought to survey it archaeologically, the site had been completely ploughed out. A quarry sits immediately to its east.
These kinds of burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic ecclesiastical practice. They tended to occupy liminal spaces, field margins, old ringfort interiors, or the edges of townlands, often chosen for their perceived antiquity or separateness from ordinary life. The Drommartin site fits this pattern, positioned at the corner of a field with open views across the surrounding landscape. That it was mapped at all suggests it was a known and named feature of the local terrain well into the nineteenth century, even if its physical traces were already faint by then. The ploughing that finally erased it completed a process of attrition that may have been underway for generations.