Children's burial ground, Slaheny, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Slaheny, Co. Kerry

On the western side of the Slaheny River valley in south-west Kerry, a low elevated platform sits in open pasture, its interior studded with small upright stones and a single uninscribed boulder at its centre.

No names are carved anywhere. No dates record who lies here. The site is known locally as "the cillíneach", and that name tells the essential story.

A cillíneach (sometimes rendered cilliní in the plural) was a burial ground reserved for those whom the Catholic Church would not admit to consecrated ground: unbaptised infants above all, but sometimes also strangers, suicides, and others considered outside the formal rites of the parish. The practice was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and such sites are often found at liminal places, field edges, old raths, or, as here, slightly elevated ground apart from the main settlement. This particular site takes an unusual L-shaped plan, roughly ten and a half metres along its longer axis, with a projecting section on its north-eastern side where a grass-covered mound rises to about eighty centimetres. The perimeter is largely earthen with some stone, while the interior is noticeably stonier, and the handful of grave-markers that survive are plain and low, none rising much beyond thirty centimetres. There are no inscriptions. The people buried here were not meant, in the theology of the time, to enter heaven; they were simply placed, quietly and with whatever private grief their families carried, in ground that was neither fully sacred nor entirely ordinary.

According to local knowledge, the site has not been used within living memory, which places its last burials somewhere in the more distant past, though precisely when is not recorded. It sits now in pasture, its stones still upright, its mound still grassed over, waiting with the particular patience of places that have been asked to hold a difficult history without explanation.

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