Children's burial ground, Kimego, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a sloping pasture above the Valencia river estuary in south Kerry, an ancient enclosure sits lower than the ground around it, ringed by an earthen and stone bank and crowded with unmarked grave-markers.
There are no inscriptions, no names, no dates. The stones simply stand, most of them upright, in ground that has grown dense with vegetation. This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground where, for centuries, unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial were laid to rest, often quietly, often at night, by families who had nowhere else to turn.
The enclosure at Kimego is subcircular in shape, measuring roughly 41 metres north to south and 57 metres east to west, a significant area for a site of this kind. The enclosing bank stands nearly a metre high on the outside, with the inner face at the northern end rising to 2.2 metres, its southern section carefully revetted with regular stone facing. That the interior sits below the level of the surrounding pasture gives the place an unusual, slightly sunken quality. A nineteenth-century laneway cuts across the western edge of the enclosure, truncating it and serving as a reminder that working agricultural life continued around these liminal spaces without much ceremony. Roughly twenty metres to the south-east stands a stone pair, two upright stones set in proximity, a separate monument type whose relationship to the burial ground is unexplained but whose presence adds another layer of quiet strangeness to the immediate landscape.