Burial, Cill Urlaí, Co. Kerry

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Burial Sites

Burial, Cill Urlaí, Co. Kerry

In the south-west corner of a steeply sloping field in Cill Urlaí, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, something sits that resists easy identification.

There is a mound of collapsed stone with slabs protruding at its centre and along its southern side, adjacent to the remnants of a rough oval-shaped hut whose entrance, just under a metre wide, once faced north. The whole area is scattered with loose stone and the remains of old field walls. Whether the mound marks a burial, a second collapsed hut, or something else entirely, nobody has settled with confidence.

The site attracted the attention of at least two early observers, each of whom left partial and sometimes conflicting accounts. A sketch attributed to Lynch in 1902 recorded a square hut described as lying near Coolaconan, and this site may be the same location. Separately, an O'Malley report from 1937, compiled for the Office of Public Works, identified a graves site in the general vicinity, though his placement was off by a field. That kind of slight geographic error was not unusual in early twentieth-century fieldwork, where recording conditions were difficult and local informants sometimes guided surveyors to approximate rather than precise locations. The accumulated stone collapse, the protruding slabs, and the oval hut remnant all sit together in this one corner of the field, lending the spot a quiet density of possible meaning that its current unassuming appearance does little to explain.

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Pete F
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