Children's burial ground, Reencaheragh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Reencaheragh, Co. Kerry

On a sloping field near the southern shore of Portmagee Channel in County Kerry, a low rectangular platform rises just enough above the surrounding pasture to mark itself out as something deliberately made.

It measures roughly fourteen and a half metres north to south and nearly twenty-five metres east to west, and within it stand up to thirty upright stone slabs, most of them gathered towards the western half of the enclosure. There is no church, no tower, no architectural ornament of any kind. What you are looking at is a ceallúnach, the local term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for infants and unbaptised children.

These sites are scattered across Ireland and carry a particular weight in the country's social and religious history. Under Catholic doctrine as it was practised for centuries, children who died before baptism were considered ineligible for consecrated ground, and so families buried them instead in these liminal spaces, often ancient enclosures at the edges of townlands, sometimes beside old ecclesiastical sites, sometimes, as here at Reencaheragh on the Iveragh Peninsula, in ordinary farmland close to the water. The practice was widespread enough that ceallúnaigh, along with similar sites called cilliní, survive in considerable numbers across Munster and beyond, though they were rarely documented with any care until relatively recently. The Iveragh Peninsula, a landscape already dense with early medieval remains, ringforts, and coastal archaeology, holds several such sites, and this one at Reencaheragh preserves its upright slabs in reasonable condition, the markers anonymous and unlettered in the way typical of these burials.

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