O'Brennan Grave Yard, Crag, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

O’Brennan Grave Yard, Crag, Co. Kerry

A graveyard that carries a saint's cave in its name, yet shows no trace of any church, is already a quietly puzzling thing.

The O'Brennan burial ground near Crag in County Kerry sits on ground that records a possible church site, but no surface evidence of any such structure has survived. What remains instead is a compact, well-maintained enclosure, its limestone walls topped with upright coping stones known as 'soldiers', its green iron gates flanked by squared piers that feel almost civic in their neatness. Farm buildings belonging to O'Brennan House, which stands just forty metres to the east, have been built flush against the graveyard's eastern wall, so that the boundary between the domestic and the sacred has, over time, become literally structural.

The name itself offers an interesting thread. O'Brennan, from the Irish Ó Braonainn, is understood to derive from Uaimh Bhreannán, meaning Brendan's Cave, a reference to St Brendan, the patron saint of Kerry and the figure associated with a remarkable early medieval tradition of ocean voyaging. A 2010 survey by Laurence Dunne found the place to be considerably larger than it appears on the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows a roughly square enclosure measuring approximately 35 by 43 metres with a farmhouse to the east. The graveyard was extended westward during the nineteenth century, and now spans some 51.5 metres north to south and 69 metres east to west, enclosed by a post-1700 rubble limestone wall with rounded corners. Dunne's survey recorded nineteen named tombs, most of them of the 'strong-box' type, which are raised rectangular table tombs, along with one particularly fine chest tomb built in dressed ashlar limestone. Eighty-two named headstones were counted in total, alongside nine headstones of rough, unhewn local stone, and fifteen unnamed tombs in poor condition.

The western and northern walls are largely smothered in ivy, and a whitethorn tree has pushed its way through the western boundary mid-wall, the kind of slow vegetable insistence that tends to win out in the end. The entrance in the south-east corner remains accessible, and the boundary walls themselves are described as being in excellent condition, the mortar courses and soldier capping largely intact.

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