Grave Yard, Keel, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Keel, Co. Kerry

Among the 669 unhewn sandstone markers that crowd the burial ground at Keel in County Kerry, two stones stand apart without quite explaining themselves.

Neither bears a name, a date, or any inscription. One carries a cross on its east face; the other, a circle divided into arcs on its west face. They may be a headstone and footstone from a single grave, though no record confirms it. In a graveyard where ninety-eight named headstones and twenty-two formal tombs were counted in a 2012 survey, these two mute slabs represent something older and less legible, belonging to a tradition of marking the dead that predates the expectation of written identity.

The graveyard itself, roughly rectangular and measuring approximately 77 metres north to south by 55 metres east to west, contains the partial ruins of the medieval parish church of Kilgarrylander at its centre, two side walls and a gable still upstanding. Seven cross-inscribed headstones were recorded here, most likely dating to the 17th or early 19th centuries, with Latin crosses and in some cases T-bar terminals. The site also holds twenty-seven architectural fragments recovered from the medieval church, including chamfered masonry blocks that probably once formed part of a string or eaves course. Two of these fragments have been set into the boundary wall at the north-east corner; one is a 15th-century twin-light ogee head, a window opening with a curved, pointed arch typical of late medieval ecclesiastical stonework. A rotary quern stone, an ancient hand-mill for grinding grain, was adapted and built into the same wall as a makeshift stoup, a vessel for holy water. A stone trough mounted in the east boundary wall now holds a bronze crucifixion staff. The 1841 Ordnance Survey map shows the graveyard unenclosed at that time, described as "Grave Yard Glebe", indicating its connection to Church of Ireland glebe lands. The enclosing rubble wall of local sandstone was added sometime in the second half of the 19th century, as the 1896 map records it enclosed. Folklore gathered from Fybagh School recalls that unbaptised children were once refused burial here and instead interred in a nearby killeen, a word for an informal burial place for the unbaptised, in a field containing a large stone known as cloc na h-altora. The tradition notes that this practice eventually changed, and such children came to be buried along the wall of the main graveyard. The same folklore identifies the Raes as landlords who once held a prominent tomb within the churchyard.

The entrance is marked by a wrought iron gate set between squared sandstone piers, with a stepped stile beside it on the east side. A blocked-up entrance at the north-west corner is still visible in the wall, a detail easy to overlook but worth seeking out. The 669 unhewn markers, simple unworked pieces of local sandstone arranged in rows across the burial ground, give the site an atmosphere quite distinct from more formally maintained graveyards; the density of unmarked graves makes the named stones seem almost incidental by comparison.

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