On the southern face of a low, narrow ridge running east to west through pasture near Kill, Co. Kildare, a shallow hollow barely seven metres across holds a quiet and sobering secret. The depression, open to the south and ringed by a handful of rough, unworked field stones set mostly flush with the ground, is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal churchyard interment. For centuries, such sites occupied a liminal place in rural Irish life, neither wholly acknowledged nor entirely forgotten, their locations preserved mainly through local memory and the occasional scatter of unmarked stones.

The site might have remained equally unremarked had it not lain in the path of the M7 Heath to Mayfield Motorway Scheme. Archaeological testing carried out in 2002, ahead of construction, recovered the disarticulated remains of a single infant, enough to confirm that the hollow was indeed a burial ground rather than a field clearance feature. More extensive geophysical survey and excavation followed in 2003, and the results were striking: the remains of approximately 70 children were identified. The sheer density of interments had caused multiple truncations, meaning earlier burials had been disturbed or cut through by later ones over what must have been a long period of use. Among the finds were shroud pins, coffin nails, and organic materials, details which suggest that at least some of the children were buried with modest care, wrapped in cloth and placed in simple coffins, even in the absence of any official rite.

The smaller stones now scattered across the hollow are not original markers but field-cleared material thrown in over time, which means the half-dozen larger earthfast stones that do survive carry all the more weight as the only deliberate indicators of where the burials lie. It is a slight, easily overlooked feature on the landscape, the kind that generations of farmers would have known to leave alone without necessarily speaking much about.