Graveyard, Farranmanagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Farranmanagh, Co. Kerry

On a hilltop in Farranmanagh, a graveyard exists almost entirely as an absence.

Levelled in 1973, it leaves no visible trace at ground level; the pasture rolls on uninterrupted, giving no indication that beneath it lies a burial ground that once appeared on Ordnance Survey maps as a substantial enclosure. The 1846 six-inch map recorded it as a square of roughly 20 metres by 20 metres, while the 1895 edition showed something considerably larger, a rectangular enclosure approximately 50 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. Whether the site genuinely expanded in the intervening decades, or whether the later surveyors simply captured its full extent, is not clear.

What little survives of the graveyard's material record has been dispersed across the surrounding area. In the 1940s, uninscribed grave-markers, plain stones bearing no names or dates, were removed from the site and carried to the church in Milltown, where they were placed beside a grotto. Around the same period, the then landowner, a Mr. Quinlan, disturbed several large mounds on the hill before replacing them when he realised they were graves; this was noted in the minutes of the County Kerry Field Club, though the precise date was not recorded. Two quernstones, the rotary hand-mills used for grinding grain that appear frequently on early Irish sites, were also found here during the 1940s. One of those stones has since ended up in the farmyard at Kilvanagh Farm; the other is held at the Heritage Centre in Milltown, where it can at least be seen and handled, a small tangible remnant of a place that the landscape has otherwise quietly swallowed.

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