Children's burial ground, Kilbaha, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Kilbaha, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Kilbaha in north Kerry, a small oval earthen bank sits in the landscape without ever having appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps.

That absence is itself a kind of clue. The enclosure, measuring roughly seven metres north to south and eight metres east to west with a bank only half a metre high, is tentatively identified as a killeen, the Irish term for an informal, unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants. These sites occupy a peculiar place in Irish folk tradition and religious history, existing outside the sanctioned geography of parish cemeteries precisely because the children interred in them were considered, under older Catholic doctrine, to be excluded from consecrated ground.

The site was brought to wider attention by a local man, Paddy O'Donovan, and was documented in the 1995 North Kerry Archaeological Survey compiled by C. Toal. The fact that it carries no cartographic trace across any historical mapping series suggests it either escaped the notice of Ordnance Survey parties during the nineteenth century or was never considered significant enough to record, which was not unusual for killeens. These informal sites were often quietly maintained by local families or communities, their locations passed down through oral knowledge rather than written record, and many remain incompletely catalogued to this day. The sub-circular form of the earthen bank is fairly typical of such enclosures, which sometimes reused the footprint of earlier prehistoric or early medieval features.

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Kilbaha, Co. Kerry
52.47820735,-9.33563974

Ref: KE00646

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