Architectural fragment, Kilnanare, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Kilnanare, Co. Kerry

In Kilnanare church in County Kerry, there once sat a carved stone block that managed to be documented, broken, and then lost, all within a few decades.

The stone was a rectangular block bearing an interlaced pattern of five-strand bands worked in low relief, the kind of decorative carving associated with early medieval Irish ecclesiastical stonework, where complex knotwork was used to ornament architectural features or grave slabs.

The stone was described and illustrated by a researcher named McDonnell in 1965, giving it at least a brief moment in the scholarly record. Sometime after that description was made, the block was broken, leaving only roughly two-thirds of it intact. By the time anyone came looking again, during a site inspection in 2000, the fragment could not be located at all. Whether it was removed, buried under rubble, built into a wall, or simply misplaced in the slow disorder of a ruined or altered church site is not recorded. What remains, in effect, is documentation of a thing that can no longer be confirmed to exist: a drawing and a description standing in place of the object itself.

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