Children's burial ground, Letter, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a south-facing slope below Bentee mountain in County Kerry, there is a raised oval platform in the rough pasture that served as a burial place for unbaptised infants well into living memory.
Sites of this kind, known in Irish as ceallúnach (sometimes anglicised as "calluragh"), were used across Ireland for children who died before baptism and were therefore excluded from consecrated ground by Church practice. They occupy a quiet, melancholy category of their own in the Irish landscape, neither fully pagan nor formally Christian, and this example on the Iveragh Peninsula is unusually well-preserved and unusually complex.
The platform measures roughly 17.7 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, reaching a height of 2.8 metres at its southern end, where a recessed area flanked by an upright stone pillar may mark an original entrance. On the platform sit an ogham stone, two possible leachta, and the burial area itself. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone; leachta are low, rectangular cairns associated with early Christian commemoration of the dead. The burial area, which occupies the western portion of the platform, contains a large number of uninscribed slabs standing up to 0.6 metres high. A curving field boundary on the eastern side may trace the site's original outer limit. According to local information recorded in the survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, the site continued to be used as a ceallúnach into the 1930s, meaning the last burials here fall within the span of a single long human life.