Ecclesiastical enclosure, Baile An Chalaidh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Baile An Chalaidh, Co. Kerry

About 250 metres south of Ferriter's Cove on the Dingle Peninsula, two ancient enclosures sit within 30 metres of each other on flat, low-lying ground.

The larger of the pair, known as Kilmore or An Chill Mhór, meaning the great church, is a near-perfect circle roughly 40.5 metres across internally, bounded by a stone wall that ranges from just over a metre to nearly two and a half metres wide, and stands up to 1.6 metres high in places. Its original entrance on the south-south-east side, just over a metre and a half wide and flanked by two upright slabs, is now blocked by a modern wall. A secondary gap to the west-south-west appears to be a later intrusion rather than an original feature.

The enclosure's interior was at some point brought under cultivation, and that agricultural past has obscured whatever structures may once have stood here. What survives is a stony mound, roughly 14 metres east to west and just over 10 metres north to south, with a shallow rectangular depression in its upper surface that may mark the ghost of an earlier building. On the south-east side of this mound stands a cross-inscribed stone, sometimes called a cross-slab, a type of early medieval marker in which a simple cross is incised directly into the face of a flat upright stone rather than cut as a three-dimensional form. This particular slab, 1.23 metres tall and about half a metre wide, carries a plain Latin cross on its east face, though the head of the cross has become indistinct over time and the base of the shaft disappears below ground level. The west face is better defined and shows a Latin cross with a bifurcated, or fish-tail, terminal at its head, where the top of the cross splits into two curved lobes. The small circular depression visible below the right arm of this cross is a natural feature of the stone rather than a deliberate carving. The site was documented and described by J. Cuppage as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published in 1986.

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