Church, Farranmanagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Churches & Chapels
On a small hillock above the Aghgarriv stream and the valley of the Laune River in County Kerry, there is a site that has effectively vanished into the ground.
A possible early church once stood here, but no trace of it is visible at the surface today. The land is now pasture, and to walk across it is to walk across something without knowing it is there.
What is known comes from memory and from a brief episode of amateur investigation. The landowner recalls having seen the foundations of a stone church measuring roughly nine metres east to west and four and a half metres north to south, dimensions that would be consistent with a modest early medieval ecclesiastical building. Accompanying these remains was a local tradition that monks had once lived on the site. In the 1940s, members of the County Kerry Field Club visited and carried out some digging, uncovering the foundations of several rectangular buildings, some arranged in pairs and others standing alone. These structures may have formed part of a broader monastic enclosure associated with the church, though no formal excavation has ever been conducted. Whatever masonry remained above or near the surface did not survive local need; the stone was taken away and reused in other buildings and as rubble fill, which is how many early church sites across Ireland were gradually dismantled, not by neglect alone but by the very practical demands of construction in later centuries.
