Graveyard, Farran, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
In the parish landscape of Kerry, in the townland of Farran, there is a graveyard that has been formally recognised as an archaeological monument, yet whose recorded history remains, for the moment, almost entirely out of public reach.
It carries the quiet weight of any burial ground, the accumulated presence of people interred over generations, but the documentary record that might explain its origins, its age, or its relationship to earlier settlement in the area has not yet been made available in any accessible form.
This is not unusual for rural Kerry. The county holds an extraordinary density of archaeological sites, from early medieval ringforts and souterrains to pre-Norman church enclosures, and graveyards in particular often mark the sites of much older activity. A burial ground associated with a vanished church or a disused chapel of ease can preserve, in its very outline and orientation, traces of community life going back many centuries. Whether Farran's graveyard belongs to such a sequence remains, on current evidence, an open question.
