Children's burial ground, Garranes, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Garranes, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing lower slopes of Barrerneen in County Kerry, a grassed enclosure holds the kind of quiet that comes from knowing what a place was used for.

This is a ceallúnach, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Christian burial. The low, uninscribed grave-markers scattered across the southern and south-eastern ground tell you almost nothing about who lies beneath them, which is rather the point. A loose mound of stones at the centre adds to the sense of a place that accumulated meaning slowly, informally, and without official sanction.

The site clusters around the ruins of Temple Feaghna, the church of St. Fiachna, which occupies the northern quadrant of a subrectangular burial ground defined by an earthen bank. That bank is thought to have originally formed the enclosure of a monastery associated with St. Fiachna, and the 1841 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map still shows its curving arc running from west-south-west through west to north. Later revised editions of the same maps dropped the boundary entirely, which says something about how institutional memory can quietly erase older landscape features. The burial ground itself sits inside a larger, nineteenth-century rectangular stone-walled enclosure measuring roughly 82 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west, entered through a pillared gate at the north-east. Writing in 1997, Dennehy pointed to three short, low mounds on the north side of the enclosure, positioned between the inner and outer enclosing elements, as further evidence of the site's use as a ceallúnach.

The immediate surroundings add another layer of interest. A bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, often associated with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual, lies about 20 metres to the south of the burial ground. Toberfeaghna, a holy well named for the same saint as the ruined church, sits roughly 50 metres to the east. A second bullaun stone is now embedded in a roadside fence about 50 metres to the north; local tradition holds that it was originally inside the graveyard itself, which, if true, suggests the site's sacred furniture has been quietly redistributed over the centuries.

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