Burial, Ballinagroun, Co. Kerry

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Burial Sites

Burial, Ballinagroun, Co. Kerry

Two upright stones standing less than a metre apart in a patch of waste ground behind a house, roughly 150 metres north of Castlemaine Harbour, are not the kind of thing that announces itself.

There is no formal marker, no explanatory plaque, nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary scatter of fieldstone one might find anywhere along the Kerry coast. Yet local tradition holds that these modest slabs mark the graves of two soldiers, identities unrecorded, circumstances unspecified.

The stones are a small and understated pair. The more precisely measured of the two, the north-easterly stone, stands just 0.6 metres high, with a base measuring roughly 0.38 metres by 0.19 to 0.25 metres, its long axis running from south-east to north-west. The other stands within 0.7 metres of it. That orientation, the proximity, and the upright placement are consistent with grave markers, though nothing in the surviving record confirms when they were set or whose remains, if anyone's, lie beneath. The soldier tradition was noted in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage, a systematic effort to document the antiquities of the Corca Dhuibhne region, but the survey could add no further detail beyond the local reputation itself. Castlemaine Harbour, at the head of Dingle Bay, has seen enough military and maritime activity over the centuries to make such a story plausible, though plausibility is not the same as evidence.

What remains is the thing itself: two stones in waste ground, carrying the weight of a story that nobody has been able to confirm or disprove.

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Pete F
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