Ecclesiastical enclosure, Duagh, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Duagh, Co. Kerry

At the entrance to Gleann Locha in north Kerry, close to the Meennascarty river, an oval enclosure of rough drystone walling encloses what was once a church, a burial ground, and the scattered evidence of several centuries of use and reuse.

The place is known as Kilcumlaghta, or Cill Cumnachta, and its interior is a dense tangle of loose stones, trees, and low upright grave markers. These graves belong to a calluragh, a burial ground typically used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated churchyards. Their markers, ranging from a few centimetres to about half a metre in height and generally aligned north to south, once included square box-like stone structures noted by the Kerry Field Club, though only one possible example of these survives in recognisable form today.

The enclosure itself measures roughly 44 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, enclosed by a wall that reaches a maximum height of 1.2 metres. Within it, the foundations of a rectangular church survive in the northern portion, with three walls preserved to less than half a metre in height and the western wall entirely gone. A round-headed window head, 46 centimetres wide, was found to the north of the church, and a slab set on edge midway along the northern wall may mark an original entrance. Scattered across the site are objects that suggest a longer and more complicated history: a bullaun stone, a large sandstone boulder with a carved circular hollow in its upper surface, lies just outside the enclosure wall; bullaun stones are associated with early Christian sites and were sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes. A probable porthole slab, a thin rectangular stone with a small rectangular hole cut through it, lies loose inside the enclosure; this type of stone is associated with souterrains, the underground stone-lined passages found at early medieval sites, though no souterrain has actually been located here. A fragment of a rotary quernstone was also recorded at the site in 1945. The writer known as An Seabhac, writing in 1939, connected the site with Dominican activity and suggested it might be the location of the 13th-century church of Baliederscolle, which appears in the Papal Taxation list of 1302 to 1307 for the Deanery of Offerba, though its precise location has never been confirmed.

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