Children's burial ground, Feoramore, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Feoramore, Co. Kerry

On the southern shore of Kenmare Bay, set into rough pasture on uneven ground, there is a small burial ground where the grave-markers carry no names, no dates, and no inscriptions at all.

Some are upright; others have fallen and been swallowed by overgrowth. Trees have taken root among them. The place belongs to a particular and quietly sorrowful tradition in Irish religious practice.

This is a cillín, a type of unconsecrated or informally consecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic teaching from burial in consecrated churchyards. Cilliní are found across Ireland, often in marginal or liminal locations: near the sea, on townland boundaries, beside ancient earthworks. The Feoramore example is oblong, measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and fourteen metres north to south. Its boundary is partial and mixed: an earth and gravel bank defines the shore side, a drystone field wall runs along the south, and the east and west ends are simply open to the surrounding land. That incompleteness feels in keeping with the ambiguous status these places historically held, neither fully inside nor fully outside the structures of parish life. What makes this site particularly notable is a detail passed down through local memory: Mass was celebrated here as recently as 1999, suggesting that the ground retains a living significance for the surrounding community, whatever the formal ecclesiastical history of such sites might say about their standing.

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Pete F
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