Graveyard, Cill Chúile, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Cill Chúile, Co. Kerry

On the north-western slopes of Reenconnell, above the flat plain watered by the Feohanagh river on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a site that is easier to read in its absence than in what physically remains.

Locally remembered as a burial ground, and reputed to be the early church from which the townland of Cill Chúile takes its name, the place has been quietly dismantled over generations. Large quantities of stone were carried away at some point in the past, and what is left amounts to a low semi-circular platform on one side of a bisecting field wall and an irregular terrace on the other, bounded by low scarps and a modern wall whose lower courses are built from unusually large boulders. Those boulders may well be fragments of the original enclosing wall, pressed into agricultural service. The grave mounds that once rose from the interior no longer survive.

The name itself is the most intact thing here. Cill Chúile, meaning something along the lines of the church of the corner or nook, belongs to a class of early Irish ecclesiastical place names in which "cill" denotes a monastic or church enclosure, often of early medieval origin. The overall footprint of the enclosure, as far as it can now be traced, measures roughly 37.5 metres east to west and 28.8 metres north to south, dimensions consistent with a modest early church site of the kind found repeatedly across the Corca Dhuibhne landscape. The site was documented in the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, which recorded both the burial ground and the presumed church site as distinct but related features within the same enclosure. By that point the deterioration was already well advanced, and local knowledge was filling the gaps that the physical record could no longer supply.

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