Burial Ground, Glenderry, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On the southern coastline of Kerry Head, beside the ruins of a small early Christian church, there is a sculptured rock sitting atop a square stone mound.
Cut into the top of that rock is a shallow alcove, sized and shaped to cradle a round stone amulet. These objects, known locally as bauleys, are not museum pieces or curiosities; one of them still lies in the graveyard, and the other is kept in the care of the Corridan family, who alone hold the right to be buried here. The tradition attached to them is precise: water drawn from the holy well nearby is placed in a vessel with the bauley, and the water is then drunk in honour of St Erc. A faded red cross is still visible on the side of the sculptured rock.
The church is known as Kilvicada, from the Irish Cill Mhic Deá, meaning the church of the son of Daigh, a reference to St Erc, the early bishop said to have presided over a community of monks on this stretch of the Tralee Bay shore. The two bauleys are attributed to him directly; local tradition holds that he blessed them, and that they retain the power to cure all evils and ills. The Corridan family's custody of one of the amulets is bound up with their exclusive burial rights to the ground, a connection that appears to stretch back further than anyone can precisely document. Schoolchildren in Glenderry recorded the associated folklore in the 1930s as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection. Their accounts note that unbaptised babies were also buried here alongside the Corridans, which placed the ground in a category that many rural communities maintained quietly apart from the main parish cemetery. The children also recorded that a supernatural light appears at the graveyard before any member of the Corridan family dies, and that a caoine, the traditional keening cry of the banshee, is heard in the district regardless of where in the world that person happens to be at the time of death. One account adds a further detail: that if one Corridan dies, two more of the family will follow within the same year. The stone roughly the size of an orange, said to return to its place on the mound no matter who removes it, appears in more than one version of the story.