Enclosure, An Fhaiche, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, An Fhaiche, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of a spur of Brandon Mountain, about half a kilometre northeast of Faha village, there is a small stone-walled enclosure that served as a burial ground for children well into the nineteenth century.

This type of site is known in Irish as a calluragh, a word referring to unconsecrated burial grounds used historically for unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial, and An Cheallúnach follows that pattern, though its associations extend considerably further back than the post-Reformation customs that governed such places elsewhere.

The enclosure is irregular in plan, measuring roughly 14.5 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west internally. Its present walls are relatively modern field boundaries that replaced a circular stone wall recorded by the Ordnance Survey, traces of which may survive in a 3-metre section of curved walling at the southeast and a low curved bank in the northwest corner. The interior is slightly raised above the ground level on the southern, downhill side, where a metre-high scarp forms the boundary. Two carved cross-slabs stand upright near the southern edge. The first, 65 centimetres tall, bears on both faces a cross of arcs set within a circle, rendered in low relief. The second is smaller and flatter, with a circle incised on its western face enclosing faint markings that may represent a Maltese cross. Around 75 metres to the south, a boulder carries a further cross inscription, suggesting the site sits within a wider landscape of early Christian marking. A second calluragh was apparently located near the village itself. The scholar Peter Harbison has proposed a connection between this site and the ancient pilgrimage route that runs from Cloghane through Faha to the summit of Brandon Mountain, one of the most significant pre-Christian and early Christian sacred peaks in Ireland, and the idea is plausible given the density of religious monuments in this immediate area.

The two cross-slabs are the most legible features remaining, and the curved masonry fragments within the enclosure walls reward a closer look for anyone interested in tracing what survives of the original circular boundary.

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