Children's burial ground, Mountluke, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Mountluke, Co. Kerry

Scattered across Ireland, in fields and on hillsides, are small enclosures that do not appear on most maps and carry no inscriptions to explain themselves.

The one at Mountluke, on the northern shore of the Valentia river estuary in County Kerry, belongs to a category known in Irish as a cillín, an informal burial ground used historically for unbaptised children and others who, under Catholic practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground. What marks this site out is the quiet accumulation of its low, uninscribed grave-markers, stones laid without names or dates, recording only that someone, once, thought the spot mattered enough to mark.

The enclosure is roughly square, measuring 26 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, and sits in level pasture. Its boundary is an earthen bank, still standing to an average height of 0.7 metres and about 2.75 metres wide, modest enough that a person could step over it without great effort. On the eastern side there is a gap of around 4 metres, flanked by two large upright slabs set 5.1 metres apart. Whether these slabs formed part of an original entrance or arrived at their present positions by other means is not known. By the late nineteenth century the site had already fallen out of use, its function apparently forgotten or displaced, leaving the grave-markers to settle further into the grass.

The site sits in ordinary farmland beside the estuary, and its low profile means it can be easy to pass without recognising it for what it is. The uninscribed stones in the interior are the detail worth pausing over; small, ground-level, and numerous, they give a concrete sense of how many burials the enclosure once held, even as the identity of every person buried there remains entirely unknown.

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