Church, Kilkeaveragh, Co. Kerry

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Church, Kilkeaveragh, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Kilkeaveragh mountain, overlooking the Portmagee Channel, a small rectangular enclosure holds something easy to walk past and difficult to date: a ruined oratory barely larger than a garden shed, surrounded by silent upright slabs that carry no inscription whatsoever.

The slabs are presumed to be grave-markers, but they name nobody. The site is known as Calluragh Burial Ground, and its very name is a clue to what it once was.

The enclosure measures roughly 30.5 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, defined by a stony earthen bank that still stands up to 3 metres high on its northern side. Within it, the south-western quadrant sits noticeably raised above the rest of the ground, and it is here that the oratory's foundations survive. The building was constructed in dry stone, meaning no mortar, with corbelled walls, a technique in which courses of stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing the roof without a keystone. The walls average 1.3 metres thick and are built of large, horizontally laid slabs; internally they still rise to about a metre in height. A doorway 75 centimetres wide opens in the western wall, and just outside it lies a large flat slab, possibly the original lintel, long since displaced. Most of the upright slabs cluster in the western portion of the enclosure, close to the oratory itself. The site's classification as a ceallúnach is significant: this Irish term refers to an early burial ground, often associated with a small church or hermitage, used for the interment of unbaptised children or others excluded from consecrated parish ground. Whether that was the primary use here is not certain, but the combination of an unadorned oratory and anonymous grave-markers is consistent with that tradition.

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