Church, Glebe, Co. Kerry

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Church, Glebe, Co. Kerry

In the fabric of this ruined Kerry church, a saint has been quietly dismembered.

A stone head said to represent St. Cummin once jutted from the east gable, recorded there in 1841 by Ordnance Survey workers who noted it projecting externally near the north end of the wall. By 1942, local memory held that the head had not always been outside at all: a man digging a grave within the church had found it underfoot and moved it to the gable for safekeeping. It was subsequently removed again, and its whereabouts remain unclear. The saint's foot, meanwhile, is said to have been built into a wall near the local GAA grounds, roughly a kilometre to the east. The gradual dispersal of a single figure across a landscape, piece by piece, is not the kind of thing that gets onto many maps.

The church itself is a rectangular structure, measuring just under seventeen metres east to west and about six metres north to south internally, with walls of random rubble sandstone bonded with lime mortar and now heavily cloaked in ivy. The west wall is largely missing, replaced at some point by a more recent construction, though a short original return survives at the south-west corner. Entry is through a pointed door opening in the south wall, framed by a chamfer-edged limestone surround, a detail suggesting late medieval work. A second door was later inserted into the north wall, its pointed arch visible only on the internal face, the lower portion blocked by a tomb that was built directly against it. Embedded in the east end of the south wall is an armorial stone carrying the Barry family arms, the date 1688, and the motto 'Boutes en avant', meaning roughly 'press forward'. It appears to have been reset into the wall at some point rather than placed there originally. The interior holds vaults and headstones ranging from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and a wall-press, a small storage niche built into the wall, sits beside one of the window embrasures. To the south-west, under heavy vegetation, lie the overgrown remains of what local tradition identifies as a monastery also founded by St. Cummin.

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