Graveyard, Lismore, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Lismore, Co. Kerry

On the summit of a small hill in the townland of Lismore, in County Kerry, there sits a largely forgotten burial ground whose last known purpose was the interment of children.

The adult dead had long since moved elsewhere, but this quiet enclosure on high pasture, with views sweeping from the south-east to the north-west, persisted in that particular role, which in Irish tradition was often associated with unbaptised infants buried apart from consecrated ground. What makes the place stranger still is how completely the memory of its origins had already dissolved by the time anyone thought to write it down.

When the Ordnance Survey visited in 1841, the chapel at the centre of the enclosure was already a ruin of some antiquity, and even then no local tradition survived as to when it had been built. The surveyors described it as a small Chapel of Ease, a term for a secondary church built to spare parishioners a long journey to the main parish church, and recorded walls standing at around two feet in height. The Ordnance Survey Name Books offer a more detailed picture: a structure roughly twelve metres long and five and a half metres wide, sitting within an oblong enclosure some thirty metres by twenty, defined by a fosse, that is, a shallow ditch, or an old stone wall. The site was known locally as Tempaleen, a diminutive form of the Irish word for church, which suits its modest scale. By 1940, a visitor noted a well-defined grave site in the field where the church had stood. The ruin itself, and its associated burial ground, belong to the Parish of Ratass, Diocese of Ardfert, Barony of Trughanacmy, in the Kerry townland of Lismore, with Lismore House sitting about 230 metres to the south-east. Aerial imagery from the early 2010s shows the enclosing earthwork still legible in the landscape, a faint oval pressed into the pasture around the vanished chapel.

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