Calluragh Burial Ground, Baile An Chnocáin, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Calluragh Burial Ground, Baile An Chnocáin, Co. Kerry

On the lower western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a small patch of ground has been receiving the dead for longer than anyone can say with certainty.

The burial ground known as An Cheallúnach sits within a sub-rectangular field, and what makes it quietly unsettling is the layering of time visible in its dimensions. The slightly curved line of the southern wall and the boulder-revetted scarps along the eastern and western edges suggest the field itself may overlie an earlier, possibly circular enclosure. The graves, if that is what they are, survive as low stony mounds across a slightly raised area roughly twelve metres across. In the centre of this, a loose mound of stones, some of them quartz, holds a carved cross-slab set into it at an angle. Children were still being buried here in the nineteenth century.

The cross-slab is the most precisely described object on the site, and it repays attention. Broken now into two pieces, it is a roughly rectangular stone, just under three-quarters of a metre tall and less than thirty centimetres wide, carved on its western face with a Latin cross whose arms end in expanded terminals, a style found across early medieval Ireland and associated broadly with the early Christian centuries. The right arm's terminal is noticeably wider than the left, which may simply be the result of erosion over time. More intriguing is what sits at the base of the cross, where the carved motif resolves into what appears to be a pair of conjoined ovals, a form whose precise meaning remains unclear. In the north-east corner of the field, the grass-covered footprint of a small rectangular building, around six metres by three metres internally, has sometimes been interpreted as a church, though nothing now survives to confirm that reading. The lower disc of a rotary quern, a hand-operated grinding stone used to mill grain, was found resting against the southern field wall, a reminder that this ground was once cultivated as well as consecrated.

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