At the north-eastern foot of a hillside in County Kildare, a barely perceptible rise in a field of pasture marks a place where people were once buried. The ground swells only slightly, a low scarp of around half a metre defining a rectangular area roughly twenty-five metres east to west and fifteen metres wide. There are no headstones, no markers of any kind. What the landscape holds, it holds quietly.

The site was known as Reilicin, a diminutive of the Irish word for graveyard, and that diminutive carries weight. Such names in Ireland frequently denote a cillín, a burial ground set aside for unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground, children too young to have received the sacrament, and sometimes suicides or strangers. Whether that was the case here cannot be said with certainty, but the name suggests it. Fitzgerald, writing in the early twentieth century, noted that interments continued on the site until around 1832. By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1838, the surrounding hillside was still wooded; today that woodland is gone, and the enclosure sits in open pasture. A church once stood within the same ground, and about a hundred metres to the south-east, archaeologists have identified a possible metalworking site, a pairing of sacred and industrial activity that points to a settlement of some complexity existing here at an earlier period.