Grave Yard, Ardcrone, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Ardcrone, An tArd Crón, a small graveyard sits enclosing the ruins of a parish church that has been quietly falling into itself since the eighteenth century.
The burial ground is roughly square, measuring approximately 43 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west, and its enclosing stone wall post-dates 1700. The entrance comes in at the north corner of the east wall, an arrangement that gives the whole site an oblique, slightly unexpected quality, as though it has turned slightly away from the road.
The church itself, known as Currans Church, was built in 1740 and served the parish of Currans, which falls within the diocese of Ardfert and the barony of Trughanacmy, rendered in Irish as Triúcha an Aicme. By the time the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey examined the site in 1986, the structure had long been a ruin. It is a rectangular building of rubble stone construction with roughly worked quoins, the dressed corner-stones that give definition to an otherwise rough-built wall, and it sits aligned on a NE-SW axis within the north-east quadrant of the graveyard. The diocese of Ardfert, to which the parish historically belonged, was one of the medieval sees of Munster, eventually united with Killaloe in the nineteenth century, which gives some sense of the deeper ecclesiastical geography into which this modest rural church once fitted.
