Burial, Coumduff, Co. Kerry

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Burial Sites

Burial, Coumduff, Co. Kerry

In the village of Knockane, roughly three-quarters of a mile south of Lough Anscaul on the Dingle Peninsula, a small, level patch of open ground holds four probable graves that nobody has quite been able to categorise.

Two of them are box-like enclosures of large upright stone slabs, not unlike megalithic cists, the prehistoric stone-lined grave boxes typically associated with the Bronze Age or earlier. One measures about 1.4 by 1.3 metres internally, formed by three slabs with a possible fallen capstone lying nearby. The other, 11 metres to the east, sits with its open side facing directly onto a steep natural scarp. A third grave is a low mound with two parallel slabs set into it, while the fourth is marked by a large boulder overlying a hollow, with a line of small stones running out from beneath it. The whole site occupies a compact area, bounded by a stream to the east and scarps to the north and south.

What makes this place genuinely puzzling is that it refuses to settle into a single period or tradition. An Early Christian cross-slab survives on site, and a second possible grave-slab was once recorded but is now missing, suggesting at minimum some early medieval activity here. One interpretation, advanced by Fanning in 1981, is that the graves belong to a ceallúnach, sometimes rendered as calluragh, a type of informal burial ground used in early Christian and later medieval Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Yet the sheer scale of the stones is not typical of such burials, and as far back as 1937, Henry proposed that the structures might instead be prehistoric megalithic cists. The Megalithic Survey of Ireland has since rejected them as megalithic tombs in the formal sense, but that does not fully close the question. The site may represent a prehistoric burial place that was reused in the early Christian period, or the stones may belong entirely to one tradition while simply appearing to belong to another.

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Pete F
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