Burial ground, Tiduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a rise in the north Kerry landscape at Tiduff, there is a stone-built enclosure that does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, which is itself a quiet oddity for a structure of its size.
Roughly oblong in plan, it measures thirteen metres north to south and seven metres east to west, with walls standing between 0.8 and 1.7 metres high. A narrow bank, about three metres wide, extends from its north-eastern sector and runs in that same direction for eighteen metres. Inside the enclosure, two distinct depressions are sunk into the ground, the larger roughly six metres across, the smaller closer to four. The combination of a raised, walled perimeter, interior hollows consistent with grave cuts, and that projecting bank gives the place an organised, purposeful quality that sits somewhere between a field boundary and something considerably older.
When the Kerry Field Club visited in the 1930s, they recovered a smooth stone ball from within the site. The object has since been lost, which is unfortunate, because polished stone balls of this kind turn up in Irish and Scottish prehistoric contexts with enough regularity to suggest a ritual or funerary association, though their precise function remains debated. The connection to burials is not certain, but it fits with the two interior depressions and the elevated, outward-looking position of the enclosure, a placement that recurs at prehistoric burial monuments across Ireland. The site carries no official cartographic record, which means it has largely escaped the kind of categorisation that might otherwise have settled the question of what it actually is.