Standing stone, Cill Urlaí, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
At Killurly on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a standing stone that no longer stands, and may no longer exist at all.
Its interest lies precisely in what has vanished: the site sits within a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often in places already felt to carry some older, pre-Christian significance.
The stone is known from a single letter. In June 1939, a Captain D. B. O'Connell wrote to H. G. Leask, then a leading figure in Irish architectural and archaeological circles, describing a gallaun, the Irish term for a solitary upright stone, positioned so that it faced what appeared to be a nearby hut site. O'Connell placed this within an area he called a "Calluragh", an anglicisation of cillín. No physical trace of the stone survives today. What does survive, at least in reputation, is a connection to an ogham stone found nearby, one of the carved upright stones used in early medieval Ireland to inscribe names in the ogham alphabet, a system of notches and strokes running along a central line. That ogham stone is reputed to have originated from this same site, which would suggest the location held some ceremonial or commemorative function long before the children's burials began.
The layering here is quietly compelling: a prehistoric standing stone, a possible early medieval ogham inscription, a post-medieval cillín, and now nothing visible at all. The place holds several centuries of marginal, unofficial, or forgotten ritual use, recorded only because one man thought to mention it in a letter more than eighty years ago.