Church, Farrannacarriga, Co. Kerry
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Churches & Chapels
A field on the Dingle Peninsula answers to the name 'Seana-Chill', meaning old church, and local tradition holds that it was once the site of a place of worship.
The church, the story goes, was not simply abandoned or demolished but physically relocated, first to the neighbouring townland of Ballynacourty and then, in a second remove, to the village of Anascaul. Nothing above ground survives to confirm or contradict this. The field is empty. The memory, however, has remained attached to the land long enough to be recorded by at least two separate writers.
The principal evidence that something was once here is linguistic rather than material. The road that runs along the eastern edge of the field carries two names in Irish: Bóthar an Aifrinn, the road of the Mass, and Bóthar an tSáipéil, the road of the chapel. Roads named for Mass paths were common across rural Ireland, often marking routes used by communities walking to worship during periods when Catholic practice was constrained, or simply the oldest habitual approach to a local church. The scholar and folklorist known as An Seabhac, writing in 1939, placed the site on the northern side of the boundary between Farrannacarriga and Ballynacourty, and recorded an additional placename, Cnocán an tSáipéil, the little hill of the chapel, for the precise location. He also noted the presence of a burial ground nearby. T. Ashe, writing in 1954, recorded the same road name independently. The site sits on the townland boundary itself, a detail that is not incidental; ecclesiastical and burial sites in Ireland were frequently established on liminal ground, at the edges of territories rather than at their centres.
There is nothing to see at the field itself, and that absence is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The place survives entirely in its names, in the road beside it and the hill above it, and in the kind of local knowledge that gets passed along without ever quite making it onto a map.
