Grave Yard, Ballymacelligott, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Ballymacelligott, Co. Kerry

A Church of Ireland building that dates from 1824 occupies a graveyard in Ballymacelligott, a townland outside Tralee in County Kerry, and the church itself almost certainly sits on top of a medieval predecessor.

Nothing of that earlier structure survives above ground. The Ordnance Survey noted as much in 1841, recording simply that the site of the old parish church had been taken over by the Protestant one built seventeen years before. It is a quiet erasure: a medieval place of worship replaced so thoroughly that it left no visible trace, its existence now legible only in documentary sources.

The graveyard that surrounds the church is a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 60 metres north to south and 53 metres east to west, bounded by rubble stone walls. A gateway on the eastern side, built around 1820, consists of a pair of cut-stone piers hung with wrought-iron gates, and the church itself sits in the northern quadrant of the space. The grave markers and mausolea within date from around 1820 onwards, reflecting the active use of the site through the nineteenth century and into the present. About 265 metres to the east lies the site of McElligott's Castle, a coincidence of proximity that hints at the kind of local power dynamics, a castle and a parish church operating in close relationship, that were common in medieval Kerry.

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