Burial Ground, Glebe, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Glebe, Co. Kerry

What catches the attention at this graveyard in the townland of Glebe, County Kerry, is a quiet incongruity: a modern altar standing along the entrance avenue, flanked by cut-limestone pillars and a wrought-iron gate, leading into a burial ground that spreads irregularly across a west-facing hillside in rough pasture.

The enclosing wall is uncoursed rubble, meaning the stones are laid without formal horizontal rows, and reaches about 1.6 metres in height. A second way in, a stile cut into the southern end of the west wall, suggests the place has been approached from more than one direction over a long period. A path follows the inside of the perimeter, and the ground rises towards the northeast before falling away to the west and southwest, giving the whole enclosure a slightly tilted, unsettled character.

Within the graveyard, in its elevated northeastern sector, stands a church ruin, and to the southwest of it the footprint of a second structure survives. Cut-stone and masonry tombs cluster inside what remains of the church interior and extend outward to its northwest and southwest, many of them now largely obscured by overgrowth. The headstones visible across the site date predominantly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the earliest recorded inscription running to 1812. By 1846, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the graveyard was already present and legible as an irregular enclosed area, outlined by dashes and measuring roughly 58 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, dimensions somewhat smaller than its full extent as measured on the ground.

The eastern entrance, reached from the main road through a gate and stile and then along an avenue roughly 26 metres long, is the principal access point. The stile in the west wall offers a more direct approach from the pastoral land to that side. The perimeter wall has been repaired in recent times, and the modern altar along the avenue indicates that the site still sees active use, sitting in that quiet overlap between active devotional space and historical burial ground that is common across rural Kerry.

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Pete F
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