Graveyard, Killaha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a north-east-facing slope in the valley of the Flesk River in County Kerry, a small graveyard sits quietly in pasture, enclosed by a rubble stone wall with vertical coping stones set along its top edge.
What gives the site a particular character is the way its history is physically distributed across the ground: the oldest material clusters at the northern end, while more recent burials occupy the southern portion, so that moving through the space is, in a modest way, moving through time.
The enclosure is roughly rectangular, running about fifty metres north to south and thirty metres east to west, with one small but telling anomaly: the south-east corner is rounded rather than squared off, a detail that sometimes points to an earlier boundary or building tradition absorbed into a later layout. The northern section contains the remnants of a church, and it is here that the inscribed headstones begin, the earliest carrying a date of 1793. Alongside these are uninscribed grave-markers and chest-tombs, the latter being box-shaped stone structures built over a burial, common in Irish churchyards from the eighteenth century onward. The absence of inscriptions on some markers is not unusual for the period; many families simply could not afford cut lettering, or chose plain stone by convention. The entrance to the site is through a gate set into the western wall.