Children's burial ground, Kilgarvan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On the outskirts of Kilgarvan in County Kerry, a large circular enclosure sits quietly beside a road, its earthen bank still clearly defined after what may be many centuries.
The interior measures roughly 52 metres north to south and 56 metres east to west, making it a substantial feature in the landscape, yet its most striking quality is not its size but its purpose: this was a place set aside for the burial of children, beyond the bounds of consecrated ground.
Sites of this kind are known in Ireland as cilliní, informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic ecclesiastical rules, could not be interred in a parish churchyard. The practice was widespread from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and cilliní were often established within or adjacent to older earthworks, perhaps lending borrowed sanctity to ground that the Church would not formally bless. Here, the enclosing bank rises between one and 1.8 metres on its exterior face, with a width at its base of around five metres, and three gaps break through it, two in the north measuring about four metres wide and one to the south-west at roughly three metres. In the north-west of the interior, several large stone blocks remain, though whether they stand in their original positions is uncertain. The site appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1841 to 1842 and 1914, each time labelled as a children's burial ground and already noted as disused, suggesting the practice of interment here had ceased before those surveys were made.
The circular earthwork itself may predate its use as a burial ground by a considerable period. Enclosures of this form in Kerry are often associated with early medieval settlement or ceremonial activity, and the reuse of such features as cilliní was common across Ireland, the existing boundary serving a practical and perhaps spiritual purpose for communities who needed a liminal space outside the parish but not entirely without definition.