Church, Killegy, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Churches & Chapels
On a low hillock just east of the Killarney to Kenmare road, in a graveyard in Killegy, there is a church that has effectively ceased to exist and yet has not entirely gone away.
No walls remain above ground, no outline survives in the grass, and a visitor walking the site today would have no obvious reason to pause. But the church was once substantial enough to leave a clear impression on the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears marked as a cruciform structure in ruins, measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and eighteen metres north to south.
By the time that map was made, the building was already failing. What happened next is suggested by research published by Skinner in 1945: rather than simply falling away into the ground, the remnants of the old church were absorbed into something new. A family mortuary chapel, a private burial structure of the kind that prosperous households sometimes commissioned within existing graveyards, was constructed in the south-east quadrant of the graveyard, and it appears to have been built using material salvaged from the earlier ruin. The connection is not entirely certain, but some of the dressed jambstones around the door opening and the head of the east window in the chapel are thought to be reused stonework from the medieval church. Jambstones are the shaped stones forming the vertical sides of a door or window frame, and their careful cutting marks them out from rougher rubble construction, making them relatively easy to identify as older, repurposed material. The cruciform plan of the vanished church suggests a building of some ambition, possibly with transepts added to a nave over time, though nothing in the surviving record establishes a precise date for its construction or original use.
