Leacht, Cill Ón Chatha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Holy Sites & Wells
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small burial ground sits unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps, known locally by the Irish term ceallúnach, a word used for informal or unconsecrated burial grounds, often associated with the interment of unbaptised children or others excluded from consecrated ground.
The site goes by the name Cill Ón Chatha, and what makes it quietly arresting is not grand architecture or dramatic landscape but the accumulation of small, rounded boulders used as grave-markers, interspersed with quartz, scattered thickly across an overgrown enclosure interior.
At the northern end of the enclosure, the ground rises to form a rectangular stone platform, roughly 3.9 metres east to west and 3 metres north to south, built up with slabs and considerable quantities of quartz, and standing some 0.7 metres above external ground level at its southern edge. This is a leacht, a term for a low commemorative or devotional cairn of stones, a form with early Christian roots that appears at pilgrimage sites and burial places across Ireland. Here the leacht is retained along its southern face by a double row of upright slabs, and a portion of a coursed stone step survives, suggesting the platform was once approached with some deliberate formality. A handful of uninscribed upright slabs also stand among the boulders, though most of the grave-markers carry no inscription at all, their identities long dissolved into the landscape. The site was surveyed and documented as part of the archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996.