Grave Yard, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

In a wedge-shaped, disused graveyard in Cahersiveen town, the grave-markers are not where they ought to be.

A well-intentioned tidying programme in recent decades lifted slabs from two sections of the burial ground and repurposed them as paving on the south side of the medieval parish church that stands within the same enclosure. Others were repositioned to line a wall or cover a floor. The result is a place where the stratigraphy of memory has been quietly reshuffled, and where what lies underfoot may once have marked someone's name above ground.

The graveyard contains the poorly preserved remains of a medieval parish church, its walls now forming part of a larger arrangement that includes a nineteenth-century church on the same site. The enclosing wall of the graveyard is unusual in that it incorporates the rear walls of a number of disused houses along its eastern side, giving the boundary an improvised, accumulated quality. Among the surviving stones, two sandstone slabs in the south-east angle of the medieval church carry late seventeenth-century dates, 1682 and 1689, making them among the more legible remnants of the site's earlier layers. The relocated grave-markers include one slab measuring just over a metre in length with an outline Latin cross incised on its surface, a simple form of funerary carving common in medieval and early post-medieval Ireland. Nineteenth-century slate markers, once scattered across the ground, now line the south wall of the medieval church and the floor of the later building.

One tomb abutting the east gable of the medieval church is reputed locally to be the burial place of the parents of Daniel O'Connell, the nineteenth-century political figure known as the Liberator, who was born on the Iveragh Peninsula. The reputed connection gives the graveyard a quiet significance beyond its architectural remains, though the modest condition of the site means it receives nothing like the attention of the more prominent O'Connell landmarks nearby. The relocated slabs underfoot, some of them paving paths walked without a second glance, are perhaps the strangest detail: memorial stones serving, for now, a purely practical purpose.

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