Church, Cinn Aird Thiar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Churches & Chapels
About sixty low, uninscribed stones occupy the southern portion of a small graveyard on the Iveragh Peninsula, overlooking Ballinskelligs Bay.
They mark no named person, no date, no epitaph. Their silence is the point: this corner of the burial ground is almost certainly a cillín, the informal term for a children's burial ground of the kind used across Ireland during the nineteenth century for infants who died unbaptised and were therefore excluded from consecrated ground. The practice was common, and the sites were rarely documented with any care. Here, the stones sit in poor pasture, modest and largely forgotten.
The church sharing this ground is known as Reglaish or Reiclés, names derived from the Latin ecclesia by way of Old Irish, and it occupies the north-western corner of the graveyard, which measures just 25 metres by 22 metres in total. It was described in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as an abbey church, though its physical remains are modest. The rectangular structure measures 9.4 metres by 5 metres internally, with mortared walls of large, roughly shaped blocks averaging about 95 centimetres thick and standing no higher than just over a metre at their tallest point. A gap in the southern wall, roughly 1.7 metres wide, is thought to be the original entrance. In 1902, a researcher named Lynch observed a cut stone from a window head lying loose inside the church; the interior has since been filled with rubble and bonded masonry, and the stone is no longer visible. The Ordnance Survey Letters recorded that the north-western external angle of the building was once rounded, an unusual detail for a small rural church, though this feature can no longer be made out on the ground. A poorly preserved enclosure lies immediately to the west of the graveyard wall, its original purpose unclear.
