Graveyard, Rathduff, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Rathduff, Co. Kerry

About a mile north-east of Anascaul, on a south-facing slope below the ridge running west from Flemingstown mountain, a graveyard holds two ogham stones, the older script of early medieval Ireland, in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone.

Their presence here points to a site in use well before the medieval parish church of Ballinvoher was built, even though no trace of an earlier enclosure survives to confirm it.

The church itself was still functioning in 1622, when it appears in a manuscript now held at Trinity College Dublin, but it was pulled down in the early nineteenth century and its rubble reused in the construction of tombs within the same graveyard. The first ogham stone, just under a metre tall, stands upright against the west end of a modern tomb near the graveyard's east side. Its inscription, damaged and partially illegible, was read by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1945 as S(I)D(A)N(I) M(A)Q(I) DALA, a personal name followed by the ogham word for "son of". The same stone carries later Christian additions on its west face: a cross enclosed in a circle, the stem extending downward to form the shaft of a second cross, and a third plain cross above the circle. It is not entirely clear whether one of the grooves near the top predates the Christian carving or was cut as part of it. The second stone, a rectangular sandstone block measuring 1.3 metres in length, was only discovered in the 1940s when a new tomb was being excavated, as noted by Macalister in 1942. It now lies flat against the west end of a large tomb, roughly fourteen metres from the graveyard's west wall. Its scores are clearly legible but the inscription admits two readings, either LLONNOCC MAQQ or SONNOCC MAQQ, with the remainder of the name lost.

The two stones together suggest this quiet hillside graveyard has been absorbing the layers of successive periods for well over a thousand years, each generation leaving its mark on what came before, sometimes literally, in the grooves cut into older stone.

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