Graveyard, Cinn Aird Thiar, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Cinn Aird Thiar, Co. Kerry

In the southern portion of a small, disused graveyard on the Iveragh Peninsula, roughly sixty low, uninscribed stones sit close to the ground.

They carry no names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. Their anonymity is not the result of weathering, but of intention: these markers most likely indicate a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and young children were interred in ground that sat outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. Such places were common across Ireland through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, their locations often chosen at the margins, literally and symbolically, of consecrated space.

The graveyard itself, measuring roughly 25 metres by 22 metres, occupies poor pasture with views east across Ballinskelligs Bay. In its north-western corner stand the remains of a structure known as Reglaish Church or Reiclés, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as an abbey church. The Irish word reiclés derives from the Latin ecclesia and typically refers to a small oratory or church associated with an early monastic site, so the name here suggests considerable antiquity, even if the surviving fabric is difficult to date precisely. Immediately to the west of the graveyard wall lies a poorly preserved enclosure whose relationship to the church and burial ground is unclear, though its presence hints at a more extensive complex that once occupied this corner of the peninsula.

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