Enclosure, Trienearagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In a field in Trienearagh, in north County Kerry, almost nothing remains of a place that once served one of the most quietly sorrowful functions in rural Irish life.
A shallow depression, roughly six metres by four, is all that survives of what the Ordnance Survey mapped, as far back as 1841 to 1842, as a killeen, a children's burial ground. These unconsecrated plots were used to inter unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic teaching from burial in consecrated ground. Families would carry their dead children to these marginal places, often at night, and lay them in the earth without ceremony. The sites tend to be ancient, liminal, set apart from ordinary fields and ordinary grief.
This particular killeen was still marked on the 1939 Ordnance Survey revision, though recorded even then as disused. Within a decade it had been ploughed out entirely, its modest boundary gone and whatever physical markers it once held destroyed. The shallow dip in the ground is the only legible trace. What makes the site unusual, beyond its near-total erasure, is the continuity of its documentation: two separate generations of mapmakers, a century apart, thought it worth recording, and yet the land itself was eventually turned over without apparent difficulty. Whether that reflects indifference, necessity, or the slow fading of the tradition that had given the site its meaning is impossible now to say.