Church, Duagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Churches & Chapels
At the entrance to Gleann Locha, close to the south-east bank of the Meennascarty river, a low oval enclosure of stone holds more questions than answers.
Known as Kilcumlaghta or Cill Cumnachta, the site contains the worn foundations of a church, a scatter of gravemarkers indicating its later use as a calluragh, an unbaptised children's burial ground, and a collection of loose objects that seem to have drifted here across centuries. Among them is a bullaun stone, a basin-shaped hollow worn into rock and associated with early Christian sites across Ireland, as well as a probable porthole-slab from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically built for storage or refuge. A fragment of a rotary quernstone was also recorded at the site in 1945, adding a domestic, workaday note to what is otherwise a quietly sacred landscape.
The church itself, in the northern part of the enclosure, survives only as rubble-built foundations, measuring roughly 3.15 metres wide and at least 10.8 metres long internally. The north, south, and east walls remain to a maximum height of just 46 centimetres, and the west wall has vanished entirely. A slab set on edge across the north wall, roughly midway along its length, may indicate where an entrance once stood. The head of a round-headed window, 46 centimetres wide, was found to the north of the church. Local tradition recorded by the writer and folklorist An Seabhac in 1939 linked the site to the Dominicans and suggested it might be the location of a 13th-century church called Baliederscolle, a place named in the Papal Taxation list of 1302 to 1307 under the Deanery of Offerba. That taxation list, compiled to assess ecclesiastical revenues for Rome, offers a rare documentary trace of what was once a functioning parish or chapel. The exact identification remains unresolved, the name Baliederscolle pointing to a real medieval place that can no longer be pinned to the map with any certainty.
