Church, Kilcooly, Co. Kerry

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Church, Kilcooly, Co. Kerry

In a low, flat field in north Kerry, the only real evidence that anything sacred once stood here is the name: Church Field.

The landowner, a Mr O'Connor, preserves that memory, and it is just about the most legible thing remaining. The ground itself offers little to the untrained eye, though a roughly rectangular space can still be traced, measuring approximately 29 metres by 25 metres externally, defined by a low, wide bank around 6 metres across. A barely discernible secondary bank curves away from the southern wall towards the east, and a small mound, roughly 4 metres by 5 metres, sits a couple of metres clear of the eastern wall. In the south-east corner, a slight gap of about 4 metres may once have served as an entrance.

What makes the site more unsettling than ambiguous is what the ground has already given up. Several skeletons were unearthed here at some point, confirming that this was almost certainly a place of burial, if not formal worship. Large stones were also recovered and, practically enough, incorporated into a nearby field boundary, meaning fragments of whatever once stood here are now quietly doing the work of a modern ditch. The site was recorded as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which classified it as a possible church enclosure, the kind of early ecclesiastical site, typically a roughly circular or rectangular enclosed area, that was common across early medieval Ireland but has often survived only as earthwork traces or in field names.

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