Ecclesiastical enclosure, Lios Deargáin, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Lios Deargáin, Co. Kerry

On the south-south-western slopes of Croaghskearda, above the low-lying land around Trabeg on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a large circular enclosure that resists easy classification.

It contains six stone mounds shaped unmistakably like coffins, a cross-inscribed pillar, a bullaun stone with a concrete patch filling a crack in its bowl, and several other features whose purpose nobody has satisfactorily explained. A field wall bisects the whole thing, and a trackway has eaten into one side of it, yet the earthen bank that defines most of the perimeter still stands nearly two metres high in places. Whatever this site originally was, it has accumulated layers of use and meaning over a very long time.

The enclosure was in use until the nineteenth century as a calluragh burial ground, a type of unconsecrated cemetery, typically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Church burial, though the six coffin-shaped stone mounds here suggest a somewhat broader funerary tradition. A turas, a structured penitential pilgrimage circuit, was formerly performed at the site on Good Friday, and it included a visit to a holy well about 200 metres to the north-east, connecting the enclosure to a wider landscape of devotional practice. An Seabhac, writing in 1939, recorded a church site within the enclosure and caves or souterrains, underground stone-lined passages sometimes associated with early ecclesiastical or settlement sites, in the field to the south. No trace of the church survives, and the souterrains have not been located. The cross pillar, which stands on a small cairn at the eastern edge of the burial area, is 0.83 metres high, with a plain cross cut into both faces. Beside it, set into the ground, is the bullaun stone, an irregularly shaped boulder with an oval hollow worn or worked into its surface; bullauns are found at early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and are often associated with healing or ritual use. Elsewhere in the enclosure, a large circular hollow some 16 metres across sits beside a wedge-shaped mound of earth and stone whose origin, whether field clearance or something more deliberate, remains uncertain. Near the southern bank, a small rectangular area enclosed by a low bank adds another unexplained element to an already complicated picture.

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Pete F
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