Graveyard, Freemount, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Freemount, Co. Kerry

At the edges of this small Kerry graveyard, where the stone boundary wall meets open pasture, a series of uninscribed markers stand without names or dates.

They are easy to overlook beside the more legible headstones, yet they point to a longer history of burial on this ground than the carved inscriptions alone would suggest. The oldest of those inscriptions dates to 1833, but the site almost certainly predates that by centuries.

The graveyard near Freemount sits in undulating farmland, roughly square in plan and measuring approximately forty metres in each direction, enclosed by a stone wall with a road running along its northern and eastern sides. Within it lies the site of a former church, a detail that explains both the sanctity of the ground and its continued use well into the early twentieth century. The overgrown mounds noted at the eastern and western ends of the enclosure are consistent with earlier, unrecorded burial, possibly connected to the church's active life. To the south-west, Macgillycuddy's Reeks form a distant horizon across the pasture, lending the site a geographic anchoring that many small rural graveyards in Kerry share, oriented towards the same peaks that have served as landmarks across the region for millennia. The uninscribed grave-markers near the outer limits of the enclosure, at the east, south, and west, may represent the graves of those who, for reasons of poverty, custom, or circumstance, were interred without the expense of carved stone.

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Pete F
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