Graveslab, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

In a disused graveyard in Cahersiveen town, the ground itself tells a complicated story.

During tidying work carried out in recent decades, grave-markers were lifted from their original positions in the south-west and north sectors of the wedge-shaped burial ground and repurposed as paving on the south side of the medieval church ruins. Among them is a slab measuring just over a metre in length, bearing a carved outline Latin cross, a simple incised design in which the cross shape is defined by a continuous cut line rather than raised relief. It is an understated object, but its displacement from grave to footpath captures something of how burial grounds accumulate and redistribute their histories over time.

The graveyard holds several layers of the past in close proximity. Two sandstone slabs set into the south-east angle of the medieval church carry late seventeenth-century dates, 1682 and 1689, making them relatively rare examples of precisely dated funerary stonework from that period in County Kerry. Almost all of the nineteenth-century slate grave-markers have also been moved, and now line the south wall of the medieval church and the floor of a later church on the same site. One tomb abutting the east gable is traditionally held to be the burial place of the parents of Daniel O'Connell, the nineteenth-century political leader known as the Liberator, who was himself from the Iveragh Peninsula. Whether that tradition is formally verified or not, its persistence says something about the weight this small graveyard carries in local memory.

The site sits within Cahersiveen town itself, so it is not remote or difficult to reach. Visitors who look carefully at the ground around the medieval church ruins will find the repurposed grave-markers underfoot, a quiet inversion of the usual relationship between the living and the commemorated dead. The two dated sandstone slabs, set into the angle of the ruined wall, reward close attention.

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