Raheenyhooig Grave Yard, Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
Sitting on a hillside above Dingle Harbour, this small graveyard contains layers of time that its tidy galvanised entrance gates do little to advertise.
Tucked within the current rectangular enclosure, beneath the dense grass at the centre of the site, are at least thirteen notched headstones, simple markers of unhewn local sandstone with a carved notch at the top, sometimes at the sides too, representing the most basic cross form used in medieval burial grounds. Alongside them, a 2010 survey by Laurence Dunne identified sixteen previously unrecorded cross-slabs, several dating to the 7th and 8th centuries AD. One of these, a thin rectangular slab with a broken corner, carries an interlaced motif of triangular panels set within a square, with C-scroll returns on the arms, a design that has no known parallel among the cross-slabs of the Dingle or Iveragh Peninsulas. Another is shaped in a Tau form, the T-shaped cross associated with early Christian devotion, similar to examples found at Kilmalkedar and Kildrum west of Dingle. Scratched onto the 1846 tomb of John Forhan, meanwhile, is a finely executed incised ship, added by some unknown hand in the second half of the 19th century.
The name itself points to the site's deeper history. Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh translates roughly as the little fort of the Uí Bhuaigh, the first element referring to a ráithín, a small ringfort-type enclosure. A curving earthen bank still traces a crescent through the interior in a general northwest to southeast direction, the surviving remnant of that original circular enclosure, which was described in Ordnance Survey records as roughly 50 metres in diameter with an old ditch around it. By 1870, Dayrolles Blakeney de Moleyns, the 4th Lord Ventry, had substantially remodelled the site: he squared off the enclosure, planted trees, laid a new roadway, and built a large family mausoleum, into which the remains of his ancestor Thomas, the 3rd Lord Ventry, who died in 1868, were apparently transferred from a nearby tomb. Dayrolles himself died in 1914 and was interred there too. The mausoleum, marked simply with a marble plaque reading 'Ventry' above the door, is a protected structure. The mature sycamores that screen three sides of the graveyard today are the direct result of his planting, and the rectangular shape of the current enclosure reflects his interventions rather than the earlier burial ground's natural form.