Grave Yard, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

On a gentle slope between the foot of Teermoyle mountain and the Ferta river, a small burial ground contains something you would not expect to find side by side: a Christian cross-slab and an ogham stone, one of those upright stones inscribed in the ancient Irish script of notched lines that predates the widespread adoption of the Latin alphabet.

The two objects share the interior of a raised, roughly rectangular enclosure planted with spruce trees, where about thirty small upright slabs stand in what appear to be regular rows. The whole space sits slightly proud of the surrounding ground, rising about half a metre above field level to the south, lending it a quiet, deliberate separateness from the poor pasture around it.

The burial ground appears to have functioned as a ceallúnach, a type of informal or uncouncecrated burial ground used in Ireland for centuries, often for unbaptised infants or others who could not be interred in parish churchyards. This one, according to local information, remained in use until the beginning of the twentieth century. The rows of plain slabs reflect that long, quiet continuity of burial practice. The site may also sit within, or at the northern end of, an earlier enclosure: a curving stretch of stony bank with an outer fosse runs about thirty metres to the northwest, and close to its inner face are traces of smaller earthworks and the foundations of a large rectangular building, suggesting that something more organised once occupied this ground. A writer named Skinner recorded that devotional rounds were formerly performed at the site on Good Fridays, a practice that ties it into the wider Kerry tradition of pattern days at sacred or semi-sacred locations, where prayer circuits around a fixed point were part of the seasonal rhythm of local religious life.

The setting is openly rural, on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, with wide views across the surrounding countryside. The cross-slab and the ogham stone are the most arresting details for anyone making their way into the enclosure itself, though the plain slabs in their rows, and the dimly legible earthworks beyond the burial ground, repay a slower look.

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Pete F
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