Ecclesiastical enclosure, An Lóthar, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, An Lóthar, Co. Kerry

On the lower western slopes of Farraniaragh mountain, above the grey waters of Ballinskelligs Bay, sits a small enclosure that manages to compress several centuries of early Irish Christian practice into an area barely thirty metres across.

Known as Kildreenagh, or Cill Draighneach, or Ceallúnach an Lóthair depending on which layer of tradition you are drawing on, it sits in rough pasture and could easily be mistaken for a ruined field system. It is not. The slightly irregular stone wall that surrounds it, still standing up to 1.2 metres high on its outer face, encloses a world of considerable complexity: an oratory, a leacht, three cross-inscribed slabs, a circular hut, and an area of burial, all within a subcircular boundary measuring roughly 31 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west.

What makes the interior particularly striking is a raised platform in the north-east quadrant, a sub-rectangular shelf about 13.5 metres by 8 metres, standing nearly a metre above the surrounding ground. It is held in place by a series of large upright slabs, many of which have since tilted outwards under the slow pressure of time, and it is reached by two stone steps flanked by opposing uprights. On this platform sit the oratory and the leacht, a leacht being a low cairn or structured mound used in early medieval Irish Christianity as a memorial or devotional focus, often associated with a saint or founder. The three cross-inscribed slabs are here too. The entrance at the south-east, formed by upright slabs and now blocked, is 1.1 metres wide; a second possible entrance at the north-west remains uncertain. A circular hut breaks into the western side of the enclosing wall, suggesting the site was not only a place of worship but also, at some point, of habitation. A modern field boundary closely follows the northern arc of the enclosure, which means the landscape itself has quietly remembered the shape of the old wall even as the wall has crumbled.

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