Children's burial ground, Knockane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
At Knockane in north Kerry, there was once a killeen, a burial ground reserved for unbaptised infants, a category of the dead who occupied an uneasy place in Catholic Ireland.
Neither fully admitted to consecrated ground nor entirely forgotten, these children were interred in liminal spaces, often ancient ringforts, boundary ditches, or small enclosures set apart from the parish cemetery. The Knockane killeen no longer exists. A quarry has removed it entirely.
The site appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, recorded simply as "Killeen Burial Ground", suggesting it was recognised and named by the surveyors who worked through Kerry in those years. By the time a later map was drawn in 1939, the notation had acquired the word "disused", which implies the ground had already fallen out of active use by that point. What happened in the decades between is not recorded. The quarrying that followed erased whatever physical evidence remained. A few rises and depressions survive in the landscape, but whether these have any connection to the original killeen is impossible to say with confidence.