Ringfort (Rath), Dromore, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On a south-western slope above the Blackwater river in County Kerry, beneath a forestry plantation, lies a small unenclosed burial ground that was once described in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as an "old small fort which is a noted place for burying children.
" That phrase alone carries a weight of social and religious history. The site is classified under the ringfort category and even carries "rath" in its official designation, yet it displays none of the earthwork features one would expect: no enclosing bank, no ditch, nothing that resembles a defended or demarcated settlement. What it does have, just outside its south-western edge, is the opening to a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage of the kind typically associated with early medieval occupation, used for storage or refuge.
The burial ground itself measures roughly twenty metres across in both directions and contains north-to-south rows of upright grave-markers, though these are now largely obscured by dense vegetation. Sites like this one were known in Irish tradition as cillíní, places set apart from consecrated ground where unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Catholic burial were interred. Their association with ancient earthworks was common across Ireland, partly because such places were already understood as liminal or significant, standing outside ordinary domestic and ecclesiastical space. By the late nineteenth century, this particular site had already fallen out of use. In the decades since, it has been further altered: a fire-prevention trench bisects it, a modern track runs along its south-western margin, and trees have been planted within the burial area itself.
The site sits within a working forestry plantation, and the combination of recent planting, the trench, and the accumulated vegetation makes it a difficult place to read on the ground. The rows of grave-markers are there, but patience is required to find them beneath the growth. The opening to the souterrain at the south-western edge is the most structurally legible feature remaining, a small reminder that whatever the site was before it became a children's burial ground, it had an earlier life altogether.