Church, Scariff, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Scariff, Co. Kerry

Scariff Island sits roughly five kilometres southwest of Hog's Head at the mouth of Kenmare Bay, and getting to its early Christian site requires a walk uphill from the landing place known as Coosaneeve, or Cuas na Naomh, on the island's northeastern shore.

That name translates roughly as the cove of the saints, which gives some sense of the place's long religious associations. What waits at the top is not a dramatic ruin but something quieter and stranger: a terraced oval enclosure measuring around 80 metres by 55 metres, its interior dropping steeply toward the southeast in two cut levels, with the sod-covered foundations of a small rectangular oratory sitting on the upper terrace and a nineteenth-century house occupying the lower one. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, enters the hillside just outside the enclosure to the southwest. Its entrance is barely half a metre high and just over a metre wide, opening into a corbelled passage that runs for nearly seven metres before collapsing into rubble.

The site carries a particular historical gravity in one detail. A ceallúnach is a type of informal or lay burial ground, separate from a consecrated church plot, and one was recorded approximately 90 metres northeast of the oratory, described in 1957 as being without any obvious feature. It may be the same disused burial place identified in earlier Ordnance Survey notes as the resting place of Francis O'Sullivan, Provincial of the Irish Franciscan Order, who was executed on the island in 1653. No surface trace of the ceallúnach remains visible today. Writing in 1837, Samuel Lewis also recorded vestiges of what he called an ancient hermitage or cell on the island's summit, already buried at that point under a mound raised by the Trigonometrical Surveyors of Ireland during their mapping work. Nothing of that potential structure is apparent now either, leaving the oratory foundations and the souterrain as the most legible elements of what was once a more complex ecclesiastical landscape.

Visitors approaching the site from Coosaneeve will find the enclosure boundary largely gone at the north, though curving field walls may preserve its general line. The upper terrace revetment, built in drystone and rising to about 1.8 metres, appears in intermittent stretches and gives the clearest physical sense of how the interior was once organised. The souterrain entrance, low and partly obscured in the slope, is worth locating if only to appreciate the quality of its construction, with neatly corbelled walls and lintel roofing still intact along much of its length.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Church, Scariff, Co. Kerry. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement