Burial ground, Skeam, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Skeam, Co. Cork

At Skeam in West Cork, the dead have been slowly returning to view, not through any excavation but through erosion.

Along the cliff face beneath and beside the ruins of Skeam Church, human burials have been exposed by the wearing away of the ground, extending roughly ten metres to either side of the church walls. There are no enclosing boundaries here, no upright gravemarkers; the burial ground announces itself only through what the coastline has gradually given up.

The burials are inhumations, meaning the bodies were placed directly in the earth rather than cremated, and they are oriented along the same axis as the church itself, a common arrangement in early Christian burial practice where the dead were laid out east to west in anticipation of resurrection. One burial, noted by Fahy in 1962, was slab-lined, its sides and perhaps its floor formed from flat stones set around the body. More striking still is the skeleton found lying directly beneath the north wall of the church, suggesting that the building was constructed over an already-established burial ground, or that burials continued right up against the structure once it was standing. Donovan, writing in 1979, recorded a local tradition that numerous interments had taken place within the sacred precincts of the old chapel of St. Keam, the figure to whom the site is dedicated and whose name it carries.

The site sits at the intersection of natural and human time in an unguarded way. The cliff continues to erode, and the burials continue to emerge, making this less a fixed monument than an ongoing disclosure.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Burial ground, Skeam, Co. Cork. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement