Cross-inscribed stone, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Crosses & Monuments
South of Kildurrihy village on the Dingle Peninsula, a laneway cuts through an oval patch of rough, untended ground.
There is no church here now, no visible graves, no marker to suggest that this unremarkable strip of waste ground was once a place of worship and burial known in Irish as An Teampall Beag, the little church, associated with the Calluragh burial ground. What makes it quietly arresting is precisely this absence, and what little survived long enough to be recorded.
When the writer Champneys visited in 1910, a fragment of one of the church walls was still standing, though only because it had been absorbed into a field wall at some point, pressed into agricultural service rather than allowed to collapse entirely. Beside it lay a stone slab carved with a cross-in-circle, a motif common in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a ringed or encircled cross was incised into flat stone, sometimes as a grave marker and sometimes as a devotional object associated with a particular foundation. That slab, recorded as a distinct find in its own right, was the last legible remnant of whatever community had once gathered at this site. J. Cuppage documented both the church remains and the inscribed stone in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, drawing on the earlier Champneys account, and by that point even the wall fragment appears to have been reduced to its present condition of near-invisibility.