Church, Kilmore, Co. Kerry

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Kilmore, Co. Kerry

A field in north Kerry holds the memory of seven churches, though none of them remain standing, or even partially so.

The site at Kilmore is one of those places where the archaeology survives almost entirely as absence: levelled buildings, disturbed ground, a partial enclosure whose southern boundary has vanished, and scattered stonework that was long ago ploughed up and tipped into the nearest fieldbank. The tradition of grouping seven churches on a single site was not uncommon in early medieval Irish Christianity, often reflecting the gradual accumulation of oratories, burial chapels, and ancillary structures around an original foundation over several centuries. Here, that entire complex has been reduced to undulations in the earth.

What survives is legible only in outline. The enclosure, which would once have defined the ecclesiastical precinct, measures at least 88 metres east to west, though its full extent is unknowable since the southern sector has disappeared. Inside it sits a large rectangular structure, 46 metres by 26 metres, its western edge cut by a later fieldbank running north to south. Further banks and a depression roughly 10 metres by 9 metres extend from its northern side, and a small mound, no more than three or four metres across at its crest, stands to the west of the same fieldbank, itself partly sliced away by it. The landowner reported that stone slabs were uncovered in the north-eastern part of the enclosure at some point, but by the time surveyors came to record the site, no trace of them could be found. The building stones of the churches themselves had already been scattered into the field boundaries, absorbed into the working landscape of the farm.

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