Graveyard, Garranes, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
Among the 65 named headstones at the Feaghna burial ground near Garranes in south Kerry, the earliest inscription dates only to 1815.
But the 246 low, uninscribed stone grave markers scattered across the ground, particularly towards the south and south-east, tell a quieter and older story. These plain stones mark graves that were never meant to be read, and the site's most telling feature may be the small, low mounds found between the inner earthen bank and the outer stone wall, in the zone that lies, in a sense, outside the consecrated ground proper. This arrangement points to the graveyard's use as a ceallúnach, the Irish term for a burial ground reserved for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Christian burial. Three such mounds have been identified on the north side of the enclosure, with a further infant burial mound noted to the west, all positioned deliberately in that liminal space between the two enclosing elements.
The site sits on the south-facing slopes of Barrerneen, about seven kilometres south-east of Kenmare and roughly 1.5 kilometres north-east of the village of Bunane, overlooking the valley of the Coomeelan Stream. At its core are the ruins of Temple Feaghna, a medieval church whose dedication gives the site its name. The holy well Toberfeaghna lies about 50 metres to the east, and both church and well were already marked on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1841, the church noted even then as being in ruins. By the 1895 revision, a rectangular boundary wall had been added around the earlier sub-circular enclosure, creating the layered arrangement visible today: an earthen bank, originally the sole enclosure, now sitting within a rubble stone wall added later. A bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, lies about 12 metres south of the graveyard's southern boundary; a fragment of a rotary quern stone has been placed inside one of its hollows. A second bullaun stone, said locally to have once stood within the graveyard itself, now sits in the roadside fence some 50 metres to the north.
The graveyard is accessed from a local road at the north-east corner via a gravel ramp, and gravel pathways run through the interior to the church ruins and around the north and east sides. The ground is uneven throughout, though the paths are well kept. Large trees grow along the top of the earthen bank on the north and west sides, giving a sense of the age and depth of that older enclosure beneath them.