Grave Yard, Derryco, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On the flood plain beside the tidal estuary of the Cashen River, where the land flattens out before the water meets the Shannon, a small ruined church sits inside a graveyard that was once, in all likelihood, nearly surrounded by marsh and estuary water.
Substantial boggy ground to the north-west and south-west of the site suggests that in earlier times the enclosure occupied something close to a promontory or island within the estuary, which gives the place an unusual, slightly isolated quality that the open pasture around it today only partly conveys. Knockanore Mountain, the highest point in North Kerry at 267 metres, sits roughly six kilometres to the north-east, visible across the flat basin.
Local tradition holds that the site was once an early monastic settlement, though no physical trace of that origin has been confirmed. What does survive is the church ruin at the centre of the graveyard, its north, south, and east walls still standing in reasonable condition, with a later buttress added to the east gable to shore it up. The rectangular enclosure around it is bounded on three sides by mortared rubblestone walls of locally sourced sandstone and limestone, with rubble coping along the top; the southern boundary is different in character, a drystone-faced earthen bank with a hedgerow above it, now largely obscured by grass and shrub growth. The entrance to the east is marked by a pair of dressed limestone gate piers, both now entirely covered in ivy, supporting a wrought-iron gate, with a stone stile built into the wall beside it, its projecting stones forming steps on both faces of the wall.
Inside, the graveyard holds 37 inscribed headstones and plots, most in good condition, along with seven tombs clustered in and around the church ruin. The majority of burials date to the twentieth century, and the site was still receiving the dead as recently as February 2011. Several unmarked graves are likely present across the ground; human bones have been exposed in areas near the northern boundary wall, a reminder that the visible record accounts for only part of what lies here. Ten graves are marked by nothing more than a simple stone of local material placed in the earth, a practice that connects the more recent dead to something much older in the landscape around them.