Grave Yard, Cill Maoilchéadair, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
Among the more than five hundred unnamed gravemarkers recorded at Kilmalkedar, most are nothing more than a rough local stone pushed upright into the earth, anonymous and unadorned.
Yet within that quiet field on the lower slopes of Reenconnell Mountain, overlooking Smerwick Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, the cumulative strangeness of what survives is considerable. Two small Tau crosses mark graves here, one of them inscribed with a simple cross. Alongside them are miniature stone crosses, one carrying faint traces of a three-sided outline square at the junction of arms and shaft, and individual upright stones bearing equal-armed crosses with expanded terminals, their inscriptions worked onto the east face of the stone in the old orientation toward the rising sun. One grave appears to be marked by a reused spud stone, the kind of iron tool once used to cut turf, repurposed as a memorial with no apparent ceremony.
The graveyard forms part of the broader Early Christian and medieval ecclesiastical complex at Kilmalkedar, Cill Maoilchéadair in Irish, a site with a long devotional history rooted in the early centuries of Irish Christianity. The graveyard itself is divided into two distinct areas: a historic eastern section that sits noticeably higher than the ground around it, and a later extension to the west, the original dividing wall now mostly gone but the difference in elevation still legible underfoot. A 2011 survey by Ann Frykler and Robert Hanbidge of Headland Archaeology Ltd. counted 506 unnamed gravemarkers in total, the vast majority concentrated in the historic section. Within that group, 23 markers appear to be reused roof slabs, identifiable by a distinctive notch cut across the breadth of the stone, and 10 more appear to have been repurposed from earlier architectural or archaeological contexts entirely. Seventeen lintelled graves were also recorded, a form of burial in which the body lies below ground beneath flat covering stones. Two of these, graves 803 and 812, lie within the nave and chancel of the ruined church itself, and because lintelled graves sit below the surface and only become visible when their covering stones are exposed or the grass thins, the surveyors noted that further examples likely remain hidden.
The historic graveyard is accessible via a stile set into the southern boundary wall, constructed from projecting flagstones that step up and over in the old manner, and a short curved avenue of drystone walling leads from the extension around to this entrance. The church ruins lie within the historic section, and the area immediately around them is where the older and more unusual material tends to concentrate. The boundary wall to the north-east, near the church ruins, was noted as being partly obscured by overgrowth at the time of the 2011 survey, which may affect what is visible on any given visit.