Grave Yard, Abbeylands, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Abbeylands, Co. Kerry

Among the eighty-three unnamed grave markers at Killagha graveyard in County Kerry, not one carries an inscription.

They are simple, unhewn pieces of local sandstone, arranged in coherent rows across the site, including one row running along the chancel of the medieval abbey itself. The abbey's north wall more or less forms the entire northern boundary of the graveyard, so the dead lie, in effect, inside and around the building simultaneously. The place is little used today and, as of a 2012 survey, was deeply overgrown, with a single perimeter path too choked with vegetation to navigate easily.

The site takes its name from Killagha, and the rectangular abbey that anchors it is a medieval structure whose wider complex left traces still visible in the stonework abutting the south elevation, including the remains of a sacristy. What makes the graveyard particularly strange is the fate of the building's own fabric. Twenty-nine architectural fragments were recorded during the 2012 survey, and the majority had been absorbed back into the abbey walls or put to secondary use elsewhere on the site. One fragment serves as a grave marker beneath the piscina, a small stone basin built into the wall of a church to drain water used in liturgical washing, which gives some sense of how thoroughly the boundary between building and burial ground has dissolved. Among the fragments identified but lost to vegetation cover at the time of survey was a thirteenth-century bowtell-moulded jamb, a type of rounded-profile stonework used to frame doors or windows, lying loose outside the south wall. Twelve masons' marks were also noted in earlier visits to the site in 2006 and 2010. The one horizontal named graveslab in the entire graveyard, the Lunny slab near the eastern boundary, was found shattered into several pieces and partly buried under plant growth.

The entrance is through a pair of wrought iron gates hung between tall square ashlar limestone piers with gabled capping, and a swing-stile provides an alternative way in. The boundary walls are mostly local sandstone rubble bedded in mortar and capped with upright stones, known as soldiers. Ivy has taken hold along the eastern and southern walls and was recorded as needing attention. The interior, with its dense vegetation and scattered stone fragments, requires careful footing.

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