Burial Ground, Kilmakilloge, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Kilmakilloge, Co. Kerry

On the crest of a steep-sided ridge above the Bunaw-Loughaunacreen road in south-west Kerry, this graveyard preserves several centuries of burial practice in a single rectangular enclosure, and some of what it contains resists easy categorisation.

Alongside inscribed headstones running from 1789 to the present, the site holds a number of low, uninscribed grave-markers, the kind that predate the convention of recording names in stone and whose exact age is now difficult to establish. A curved earthen scarp running roughly north-west to north-east, just over 26 metres long and less than a metre high, sits to the north of the old church and inside the original boundary of the graveyard. Scarps of this kind sometimes indicate earlier activity on a site, a reorganisation of space, or the edge of an older enclosure, though here its precise origin is not recorded. What is clear is that the graveyard has expanded northward into an adjacent field, its new cement boundary wall a sharp contrast to the vertical stone coping of the older enclosure walls on the other three sides.

The church itself, a roofless structure occupying the north-west corner of the graveyard, gives the site its name: Kilmakilloge, a placename that likely incorporates the Irish word for church. Around ten altar-tombs are distributed across the site; an altar-tomb is essentially a raised chest tomb, its sides and top formed of shaped stone slabs or cut masonry. The most notable is the cut-limestone tomb of Mac Finnin Dubh, dated 1809. The later headstones, including Celtic-cross type monuments from the late nineteenth century and a range of twentieth-century markers, are concentrated in the eastern section of the graveyard, leaving the older western portions with a quieter, less legible character. Two further features are closely associated with the site: a saint's stone and a standing stone, both of which point to a long history of use that almost certainly predates the Christian burial ground as it now appears.

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