Kilkeary Graveyard

History

About this graveyard

Kilkeary graveyard lies in Kilkeary townland, about three miles south-east of Nenagh beside the main Nenagh–Thurles road, the only burial ground of the civic parish of Kilkeary in Upper Ormond (now part of the Catholic parish of Toomevara, and of the Nenagh Union in the Church of Ireland). Within the graveyard are the foundations of a Medieval parish church, though no identifiable features of it survive; it is said to take its name from St. Kera, of whom little is known but whose death is recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters on 5 January 679 — she formed a community near Kilkeary and is supposed to be buried there. There are 92 inscribed monuments, all deciphered. The oldest is that of William Carroll of Ballygrenode, who died in 1706; the handsomest is the obelisk raised to General Sir William Parker Carroll (C.B., K.C.H.), thought to be a miniature of the Wellington Memorial in the Phoenix Park, its obelisk inscribed with the less well-known battles of the Peninsular War in which the general served with the Spanish guerillas. Mary Feely, remembered on one of the stones, is believed to have inspired the poem "The Dying Girl" by Richard Dalton Williams, who was reared at Grenanstown, Toomevara. Recorded by Denise Foulkes for the Ormond Historical Society's survey of the Barony of Upper Ormond (Section B, Volume 1), December 1981.