Children's burial ground, Maulcallee, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Maulcallee, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Knocknagullion in south Kerry, an oval hollow sits in a reclaimed field with little to announce what it once was.

Small uninscribed upright slabs, none of them much taller than a hand's width above the ground, mark the area where burials took place. There are no names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. This is a killeen, a type of unconsecrated burial ground used in Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal churchyard burial under Catholic practice. These sites are found across the country, but they tend to survive quietly, without signage or ceremony, which is part of what makes them so striking when you come upon one.

The site overlooks the Blackwater river valley to the south and east, and although it is now surrounded by reclaimed agricultural land, the oval bank that once defined its boundary is still partially traceable along the southern half of the enclosure. That bank, built from earth and a considerable amount of stone, ranges from just under half a metre to about one and a half metres in external height and is roughly 1.3 metres wide where it survives. The interior measures approximately 20 metres north to south and 13.5 metres east to west, though the burials themselves seem concentrated in the southern portion, where the small slabs are aligned mostly north to south. By the mid-nineteenth century the site had already passed out of active use as a burial place. What is perhaps less expected is that it was also a place of ritual observance: rounds, meaning a prescribed circuit of prayer and movement around a sacred site, were formerly made here on Good Fridays, suggesting that the community maintained some form of devotional connection to the place even after burials ceased.

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