Church, Kiltomy, Co. Kerry

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Church, Kiltomy, Co. Kerry

In a graveyard in north Kerry, there is nothing left of the church that once stood there.

Not a wall, not a doorway, not a dressed stone in situ. The building was dismantled and its material reused to extend the surrounding cemetery wall, which means the church, in a manner of speaking, became its own enclosure. What survives instead are two carved stones bearing skull and crossbones designs and the enigmatic inscriptions VELA BRIVI and NE ME NAMORI. These are said to have formed part of an altar erected in memory of a Fitzmaurice lady buried on the site, though nothing further is recorded about who she was or when she died.

The place is known in Irish as Cill Tóime, the church of Tóime, and its origins are old enough to be genuinely obscure. A founder named Domaingein is associated with the site from around 580 AD, placing it within the early monastic tradition of small, locally rooted Christian foundations that spread across Ireland in the centuries after Patrick. The church that eventually replaced whatever stood in that early period was built in 1623, its construction date recorded on a datestone set into the south wall near the south-east corner. John O'Donovan noted the plaque in 1841, giving its measurements as fifty-eight feet in length, twenty-one feet in breadth, with walls two feet three inches thick, which suggests a modest but solidly built structure. By the time Dennehy wrote about it in 1942, the building had already been knocked, its stones absorbed into the boundary wall it once stood within. The datestone itself has since disappeared, leaving O'Donovan's description as the main evidence that it ever existed.

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