Children's burial ground, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

On the floor of the Bridia valley in south Kerry, in ground that drains poorly and stays damp, there is a circular earthwork that once served as a cillín, a type of burial ground traditionally used for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground.

Known as Cillín na Maoile, or Killeennamoyla, the site sits in a landscape that feels remote even by the standards of the Iveragh peninsula, and its overgrown interior conceals more than it immediately reveals. These cilliní were a persistent feature of Irish rural life for centuries, occupying a quietly painful space between the formal structures of the Church and the grief of families who had nowhere else to bury their dead.

The enclosure is roughly circular and measures about 35.5 metres north to south and 35.7 metres east to west, defined by a bank and an external fosse, which is a ditch running around the outside. The fosse survives in reasonable condition for much of its circuit, reaching up to 0.75 metres deep and over three metres wide in places, though a modern stone wall built along the western side has partially filled it in at that point. The bank itself rises about a metre from the base of the ditch before falling away to the interior. There is an entrance gap of 2.2 metres in the bank on the north side, with rough stone facing preserved on either side of it for roughly 4.5 metres. Within the enclosure, the ground slopes gently upward toward the north and is largely overgrown. Toward the eastern side, where the terrain becomes stonier, a small cairn survives, standing 0.7 metres high and three metres across, alongside a low wall running northeast to southwest for about six metres. Several small uninscribed upright stone slabs are also present in this part of the site, their plainness typical of cillín burial markers, which rarely carried names or dates.

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