Church, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

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Church, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

A laneway runs north to south through what was once a sacred enclosure, and most people who use it probably have no idea what lies beneath their feet.

Just south of Kildurrihy village on the Dingle Peninsula, an oval patch of waste ground is all that remains of a church and burial ground known in Irish as An Teampall Beag agus An Cheallúnach, the small church and the calluragh. A calluragh, or ceallúnach, is an early ecclesiastical burial ground, often associated with unbaptised children or pre-Norman Christian communities, and the name alone signals considerable antiquity.

When the Ordnance Survey recorded the site in the nineteenth century, it was still legible as a roughly circular area some 120 feet, or 36 metres, across, partly enclosed by a stone wall and containing numerous graves and headstones. The foundations of two rectangular buildings were visible inside: the larger measured 60 feet at its greatest extent with walls nearly a metre thick, and a smaller structure measured roughly 15 by 9 feet. By 1910, when the architectural historian Champneys noted the site, even that much had contracted: only part of one wall of the church survived, and it had been absorbed into a field boundary. Beside it, a stone slab carried an incised cross-in-circle, a motif common in early Christian Ireland and typically associated with memorial or boundary markers from roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries. Whether that slab remains in place today is unclear.

The site sits in a landscape already dense with early medieval remains across the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, but Cill Ura Thoir has slipped further from view than most. The waste ground traversed by the lane offers no signage, no interpretation, and no obvious boundary to mark what once stood there. The cross-inscribed slab is worth looking for along the old field wall to the south, though its condition and exact position have not been recently confirmed.

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