Burial, Baile An Chalaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Sites
Along a field boundary in Baile An Chalaidh, on the Dingle Peninsula, a drystone grave turned up roughly forty years ago, built in the dry-walling tradition of unmortered stacked stone, and of what locals described as average size.
Whether it ever held human remains is an open question; accounts conflict, and no firm conclusion has been drawn.
A metre or so to the east of the same fence line sits something stranger still. Locals call it a liosachán, a term that gestures loosely at a small, enclosure-like feature, though in this case the word does not quite resolve the puzzle. What is actually there is a low, disordered spread of stones, roughly 10.8 metres east to west and 13 metres north to south, rising only between 0.3 and 0.5 metres from the ground. Within it stands a single orthostat, an upright standing stone, half a metre high. Whether this stony confusion is the remnant of a field system, a collapsed structure of some kind, or something older and more deliberate is not known. Its relationship to the nearby grave is equally unclear. J. Cuppage documented both features in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, and the classification of the liosachán has remained unresolved since. That unresolved quality is itself the point: two features sit within metres of each other, one possibly a grave, one of unknown function, and the connection between them, if there is one, has not yet been explained.