Church (in ruins), Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

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Church (in ruins), Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

A tomb built directly across the doorway makes entry to this small ruined church almost impossible, and that is before you contend with the deep, partially open burial vaults inside.

The graveyard at Ballywiheen, known in Irish as Teampall Bhaile Bhoithín, sits about a kilometre southeast of Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula, set back from the Ventry road on the lower eastern slopes of Ballineanig Hill. The dead have been accumulating here for so long, and in such numbers, that the ground level inside and around the church has risen substantially, distorting the walls from below as much as the weather has worn them from above.

The church is a plain rectangle, measuring just under 12 metres by 4.6 metres internally, its walls built from small split sandstone rubble set in clay mortar and surviving almost to their original height in places. It was probably the parish church of Marhin, and a Royal Visitation record from 1615 confirms it was still in repair at that date. The east gable, standing at 3.9 metres, keeps some of its coping, and the windows retain their double splay, a construction technique where the opening widens both inward and outward to admit more light through a thick wall. The lower jambs were rebated to receive a shutter. A pivot hole and draw-bar socket in the north wall doorway show that the entrance once had a proper door. Beam holes in the north and south walls, together with a broken corbel on the west gable, point to an attic storey at the western end, lit by a narrow rectangular opening barely half a metre wide. Two small aumbries, recessed wall-cupboards used to store liturgical vessels, survive in the southeast corner, though they are largely obscured by the encroaching burials. About 75 metres to the southwest lies a separate calluragh, a burial ground traditionally used for unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground.

When surveyors Karen Buckley and Laurence Dunne visited in 2007, they found the church interior heavily overgrown with grass and brambles. A cross-inscribed grave-slab, recorded in an earlier survey, had by then been moved and was standing loosely in the east window embrasure. A stone font previously noted inside the church could no longer be located, possibly concealed beneath the vegetation. The older graves cluster to the south of the ruin, with more recent burials spreading to the north, the graveyard still in active use around a church that has not been for some centuries.

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