Children's Burial Ground

Kilgrovan in County Waterford is called a children's burial ground because R. R. Brash used the word cilleen in the 1860s, yet excavations in 2003 and 2007 found no buried child, adult or bone at all. The name therefore points to fear, belief or loss of imagination rather than to a grave, and the site becomes a measure of how readily people populate empty ground with the dead. What is missing is the interesting part: a place remembered as holding children but resisting every attempt to show one.