Burial ground, Sliss, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
A large stone slab lies in the eastern sector of a roughly square enclosure in a corner of a pastoral field in Sliss, north Kerry.
It may mark a burial. Around it, other stones are scattered without obvious pattern. The site is known as Kyle burial ground, and by 1914 the Ordnance Survey was already labelling it disused, which suggests its active use had ceased well before the twentieth century, though precisely when is not recorded.
The 1841 to 1842 OS mapping first fixed the name "Kyle burial ground" to this location, giving it at least a documentary anchor in the mid-nineteenth century. What survives today is an earthen enclosing bank, roughly square in plan, that runs from the north around through the east to the south-east. It stands about 1.3 metres above the surrounding land, is approximately 6 metres wide at the base, and contains the interior to a lesser height of around 0.8 metres. Three gaps interrupt the bank, two on the northern side measuring 9 metres and 4 metres wide, and one to the south-east measuring 4 metres. The southern and western banks have been lost entirely, levelled when modern field boundaries were put in running north to south and east to west. The enclosure itself measures roughly 51 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west internally, dimensions that point to a site of some ambition in its original form. Immediately to the north-west lies a reputed holy well, and the proximity of the two is unlikely to be coincidental. The pairing of burial ground and holy well is a recurring feature of early Christian and medieval sacred landscapes in Ireland, where the sanctity of water and the needs of the dead were often understood to belong to the same geography.