Grave Yard, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
Two graveyards occupy the same ground at Ballyseedy, near Tralee in County Kerry, yet visitors entering one section cannot cross into the other without going back out through the gate and re-entering separately.
The site is split between an older burial ground, which contains the ruins of a medieval parish church in its north-western corner, and a newer extension to the south, centred on a Church of Ireland building dating from around 1870. The two areas share a boundary wall, but there is no formal opening between them once inside.
The rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly 29 metres north to south and 78 metres east to west, already appears in its recognisable form on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map published in 1841, though the medieval church ruin it contains is considerably older. The newer section, added when the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building was established, brought a different character to the site: cast-iron gates between cut-stone piers, a concrete-capped eastern boundary wall, and, in places, barbed wire running along the top of the rendered boundary walls. The older graveyard, by contrast, retains its original wrought-iron gates set between large limestone and sandstone piers, with rubble limestone walls rising over two metres high and thick with ivy in places. By 2008, when the site was surveyed, parts of the southern wall of the older area had become irregular in height through collapse, and the western end was largely inaccessible behind a press of tombs and overgrown brambles.
The two entrances sit close together along the eastern boundary, so the separation only becomes apparent once you step inside. The older graveyard's western reaches remain difficult to navigate on the ground, but the medieval church ruin in the north-western corner is visible from the entrance. The blocked-up southern entrance to the newer section, still legible in the boundary wall, is one of those small details that quietly marks how a place has shifted and been reordered across the centuries.