Burial ground, Beheens, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Beheens, a low earthen bank curves through farmland in a shape that most passing eyes would take for a natural rise in the ground.
It is almost certainly something else entirely: an ancient burial ground, possibly the same site that the folklorist and scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted in 1958 as lying near a holy well known as Tobar Uí Leidhin, a name that translates roughly as the well of the Ó Leidhin family or sept. The association between burial grounds and holy wells is common in early Irish tradition, the two often forming a paired sacred landscape whose origins can be difficult to date and harder still to untangle.
What survives today is considerably reduced. A fieldbank running in a north-west to south-east direction cuts directly through the site, which has been much levelled over time. Even so, the underlying geometry remains readable. A sub-circular earthen bank, roughly eight metres wide at its base and rising between sixty and eighty centimetres on its outer face, defines the outer edge. Inside that, a semi-circular enclosure faces north-north-east, measuring ten metres north to south and twelve metres east to west internally. The overall interior of the site spans some fifty-four metres north to south and forty metres east to west, dimensions that suggest this was once a substantial enclosed space rather than a modest field monument. These kinds of enclosures, often called cashels or raths depending on their construction material, were sometimes adapted or repurposed as burial grounds in early Christian and medieval periods, their pre-existing boundaries lending a sense of sacred separation from the ordinary working landscape.