Burial Ground, Loughanes, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Loughanes, Co. Kerry

A running stream separates two burial grounds near Lisselton in north Kerry, and that separation is not merely physical.

On one side of the water lies a graveyard attached to the ruins of a late eighteenth-century Church of Ireland church, itself now reduced to its western tower or belfry. On the other side, reached by a small bridge and trackway, lies a children's burial ground, a cillín, containing the unmarked graves of the unbaptised. In Irish tradition, such children could not be interred in consecrated ground, and the stream here functions as more than a practical boundary; it marks a threshold between the churchyard proper and a space that existed quietly outside it.

By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the area at six inches to the mile in 1841, the burial ground appeared as a roughly circular enclosure of about nineteen metres in diameter, sitting to the south-east of the church ruins. Half a century later, the 1896 twenty-five-inch map shows a changed picture: road-widening had cut into the north-east of the enclosure, and the stream had trimmed its north-west edge, leaving a small polygonal shape where the circle had been. A survey carried out in 2010 by Laurence Dunne recorded thirty-eight unnamed headstones within the main graveyard and eighty-eight within the children's burial ground across the stream. Most of the graves are marked with unhewn stones; a few carry simple iron crosses from which any engraved name plate has long since vanished. The glebe lands once associated with the Church of Ireland vicarage still appear on the earlier map, one parcel almost touching the children's burial ground to the south, another occupying two fields to the west.

The trackway that crosses the bridge runs along two sides of the pentagonal graveyard before splitting towards a farm at the south-west corner and a private residence at the north-east, so the burial ground sits within a working agricultural landscape rather than apart from it. The belfry tower of the ruined church remains visible, a solitary remnant of what was once a First Fruits church, a category of Church of Ireland building erected in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using funds administered by the Board of First Fruits.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Burial Ground, Loughanes, Co. Kerry. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement