Calluragh Burial Ground, Rinn Chonaill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
At the head of a broad valley running north from Dingle Harbour, a low stony bank traces a near-square outline in the hillside.
Inside it: a burial ground, a large stone cross, and the uncertain remains of what may once have been a hut. The enclosure is not dramatically ruined nor impressively preserved; it sits quietly on a south-facing slope, easy to overlook, its boundaries worn down to no more than 75 centimetres in height. What makes it worth pausing over is precisely this ambiguity, the way so many of its basic questions remain open.
Known in Irish as An Cheallúnach, a word that shares its root with cill, the term for an early ecclesiastical enclosure or cell, the site measures roughly 28.6 metres east to west and 30.3 metres north to south. The boundary bank that defines it all around is thought to be either the debris of a former stone wall or the remnant of a stone-faced earthen bank; surveyors have not been able to determine which. The original entrance is equally unclear. There are gaps in the bank to the south and at the north-east corner, and two possible jambstones, the upright stones that would have flanked a doorway, stand about a metre apart in the east bank, though they rise only some 40 centimetres above ground. The graves themselves are concentrated in the eastern half of the enclosure, each marked by a low mound no more than 1.5 metres in length, sometimes with a small upright stone at either end. The description of the site was first published in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, a detailed inventory that remains a key reference for the region's early Christian and prehistoric monuments.