Chapel, Chapel Island Little, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
A sixteenth-century map of Bantry and Beara marks a small chapel on Chapel Island Little, a scrap of land off the Cork coast that today barely qualifies as a single island at all.
When archaeologist Tony Miller visited in April 2012, he found that the island's two halves are now divided at high tide by nothing more than a shingle beach, the sea having quietly been reclaiming the ground between them for centuries. The chapel itself, wherever it once stood, has left no obvious trace above ground.
The map evidence connects the site to a church known as Iniscuingi, recorded in a decretal letter, an administrative letter issued by the Pope carrying the force of canon law, as early as 1199. By the late medieval period it was listed as a possession of Gill Abbey, a Cork monastic house. The connection to the O'Sullivan Beare lordship, the Gaelic dynasty who controlled much of this coastline, gives the island a political as well as a religious dimension, the kind of small dependent chapel that would have served a scattered maritime community under a powerful local family. What Miller found on the ground, however, does not straightforwardly confirm any of this. At the eastern tip of the island's western half sits the ruin of a long stone house set on a levelled rectangular terrace, revetted by a well-built dry-stone wall running roughly 40 metres along its northwest side. The oldest part of the building, constructed without mortar and measuring approximately 5.2 metres wide by 10 metres long, has a small window in its northwest wall and a doorway to the southeast. A later extension, bonded with lime mortar and running a further 6 metres to the southwest, was added at some point but left internally unconnected to the earlier structure. The building sits on a narrowing strip of land, the pebble beach pressing in from the south-east.
Miller's own view was that the ruined house itself is unlikely to be the chapel shown on the map, but he raised the possibility that the larger enclosing wall and levelled terrace might relate to an earlier church site or burial ground. The dry-stone revetment is well constructed, and the deliberate levelling of the ground it surrounds suggests something more considered than a domestic yard. A short wall or possible breakwater extends from the corner of the enclosure into the sea, a detail that speaks to a community that had to manage both its land and the water constantly threatening to take it.