Burial ground, Clashmelcon, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In a sloping field in north Kerry, there is a burial ground that does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps.
It leaves almost no impression on the landscape: a low, sub-circular rise, roughly 5.6 metres across and no more than a quarter of a metre high, easily mistaken for a natural irregularity in the pasture. What makes it quietly remarkable is not what survives but what has recently vanished. Until some point before the site was surveyed, three small, irregularly shaped upright stones protruded from the rise, reportedly bearing carved designs described by the landowner, Mr Dineen, as resembling squiggles. By the time a surveyor visited, not one of them could be found.
The site was recorded in Caroline Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which drew together a wide range of monuments across the region, many of them similarly modest in scale and poorly documented. The disturbed centre of the rise, with its scatter of visible stones, suggests the site has been interfered with at some point, though whether the uprights were removed, pushed over, or simply absorbed into the ground is unknown. Carved markings on burial markers of this kind can sometimes represent early medieval Christian ornament or older, less classifiable traditions of memorial, but without the stones themselves, any interpretation is speculation. What remains is a slight swelling in a Kerry field, the memory of three marked stones, and no map reference to confirm it was ever there at all.