Burial, Coumduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Sites
In the village of Knockane, roughly three-quarters of a mile south of Lough Anscaul on the Dingle Peninsula, a small level patch of ground holds four probable graves that nobody has quite been able to categorise.
Two of them are box-like arrangements of large stone slabs set on edge, forming rectangular enclosures not unlike megalithic cists, the prehistoric stone-lined grave boxes typically associated with Neolithic and Bronze Age burial. One measures about 1.4 by 1.3 metres internally; another, set 11 metres to the east, is slightly smaller and opens directly onto a steep scarp at the southern edge of the site. A third grave takes the form of a low mound with two parallel slabs embedded in it. The fourth is marked by a large boulder resting over a depression, with a short line of small stones emerging from beneath it and running south-west. The whole area, roughly 38 metres east to west and just over 10 metres north to south, is naturally defined by scarps and a stream.
What makes this site genuinely puzzling is that scholars have not agreed on what it actually is, or even what era it belongs to. In 1937, Françoise Henry interpreted the stone structures as megalithic cists; in 1981, Thomas Fanning read them instead as ceallúnach graves, a term referring to informal or marginal burial grounds, sometimes called calluraghs, where unbaptised children or others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often over long stretches of time from the early medieval period onward. An Early Christian presence is suggested by a cross-slab on the site and by a second possible grave-slab that has since gone missing. It is possible the graves belong to that Early Christian phase, or that the site was reused as a calluragh at a later point. Against the Christian interpretation, however, is the notably large size of the stones, which is not characteristic of Christian burial practice. The Megalithic Survey of Ireland has formally rejected the structures as megalithic tombs, but the possibility that they are prehistoric cists has not been entirely set aside. The site sits in an unresolved middle ground, archaeologically speaking, somewhere between deep prehistory and the early medieval period, with the evidence insufficient to settle the matter either way.