Children's burial ground, Killarida, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Killarida, Co. Kerry

A burial ground that has disappeared entirely from the landscape is a peculiar thing to contemplate.

At Killarida in County Kerry, a site once known as Kyle Burial Ground occupies precisely that category: recorded, named, and then gone, leaving no trace on the ground for anyone who might go looking.

The place was documented on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, where it appears as a small circular enclosure labelled Kyle Burial Ground. Circular enclosures of this kind were commonly associated with cillíní, informal burial grounds used for unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground, a practice that persisted across rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. The word "kyle" itself likely derives from the Irish "coill", meaning a wood or grove, though its application here to a burial site suggests a place that carried local significance beyond its modest size. By the time the next detailed mapping was carried out in 1939, the enclosure had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and today no surface trace survives. The gap between those two surveys, nearly a century, is all that can be said with certainty about when it ceased to be a visible feature of the land.

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