Grave Yard, Carhoona, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Carhoona, Co. Kerry

In the ruined church of Kilnaughtin, Cill Neachtain in Irish, meaning the church of Neachtan, a Hamilton tomb sits inside roofless medieval walls while five stone plaques remain fixed to the interior stonework as though the building were still in use.

Outside, the graveyard wears two faces: an older western section enclosed by un-coursed rubble limestone, the kind of dry, roughly stacked walling found throughout Kerry, and a newer eastern addition built from concrete block that gives the whole site its slightly asymmetrical, wedge-shaped outline. It is a place where the medieval and the municipal sit side by side without apology.

The site's most travelled artefact left Kerry long before any of the current walls were raised. An ogham stone, one of the early medieval carved standing stones on which an archaic script using notches along a central stem was used to record names and dedications, was discovered in 1836 by the antiquarian John Windele lying roughly 1.8 metres from the south-east corner of the church. R.A.S. Macalister later catalogued it as number 228 in his 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions. The stone is now held at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, a long way from the burial ground where Windele found it. The 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the graveyard as a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 37 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west, with the church sitting at its centre.

A survey carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 recorded 280 named headstones alongside twelve without names, eight of the latter being plain iron crosses that may never have carried a name plaque. Seven wall plaques, two table graves, seven large rectangular grave slabs, and three strong-box tombs, a term for the raised rectangular chest-shaped monument common in Irish graveyards from the eighteenth century onward, complete the picture. The oldest legible headstones date from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are concentrated in the area immediately around the church. An outdoor altar and seating area occupy the southern corner, suggesting the site continues to be used for occasional open-air commemoration.

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