Building, Kimego, Co. Kerry

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Utility Structures

Building, Kimego, Co. Kerry

At Kimego in County Kerry, there is a monument that no longer exists, and the argument about what it was outlasted the structure itself.

A small drystone building, rectangular in plan, once stood pressed against the inner face of a caher, a type of stone-walled ringfort common in early medieval Ireland, at the site's northern edge. It was taken down by the Office of Public Works in the early 1980s, leaving behind only its recorded dimensions and a disagreement that had been simmering in the scholarly literature for decades.

The building was modest by any measure: roughly 2.8 metres north to south and 2.4 metres east to west internally, with walls averaging about 55 centimetres thick. Its eastern wall appeared to have been gabled and stood to a height of 1.9 metres. When a writer named Lecky examined it in 1914, he suggested it might have been an oratory, a small private prayer cell of the kind associated with early Christian monastic sites. That interpretation carried a certain appeal given the setting, but it ran into a problem: the Earl of Dunraven, who had surveyed and published a plan of the site back in 1875, had not included the structure at all. Françoise Henry, writing in 1957, took that absence as evidence that the building was of modern date rather than early medieval origin. The OPW, it seems, eventually settled the question by removing it entirely, though the disagreement between Lecky's reading and Henry's has never been formally resolved.

Nothing now marks where the building stood, and a visitor to the caher at Kimego would find no trace of it. What remains is the older enclosure itself, and the curious paper trail of a structure that was photographed, measured, debated, and then quietly dismantled before any consensus was reached.

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