Ecclesiastical enclosure, Baile An Tsagairt, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Baile An Tsagairt, Co. Kerry

On a low but conspicuous hillock between Dingle Harbour and Trabeg, a circular earthen enclosure contains nine rounded boulders arranged in a deliberate ring, with a tenth set apart at the centre.

Each stone is carved in ogham, an early medieval script that encodes names and lineage relationships using a series of notches and strokes cut along a stem-line. What makes Ballintaggart unusual is not merely that ogham stones survive here, but that so many have been gathered into a single place, and that the stones themselves are not the upright slabs typical of the tradition. They are oval, water-rolled boulders, physically similar to material from the storm beach at Minard, which raises questions about their original purpose and provenance that no one has fully resolved.

The enclosure is known in Irish as An Cheallúnach or An Lisín, and it incorporates a burial ground measuring roughly 30 by 29 metres internally. A church is marked within it on Ordnance Survey maps, though no physical trace of any structure has been identified on the ground. The burial ground was still in use for the interment of children in the mid-nineteenth century, a practice associated with calluraighe, informal burial sites for unbaptised infants set apart from consecrated ground. To the east of the enclosure lies a low cairn containing a notable amount of quartz, and beyond that what earlier accounts describe as tombs with large, rough stones half buried in the earth. The nine ogham stones were gathered from scattered locations across the surrounding area: some came from field fences to the south, one lay loose in a ditch near the enclosure itself, and others appear to have been associated with the cairn or the nearby tombs. John Windele recorded several of them as early as 1838. The inscriptions follow formulaic conventions, recording personal names and genealogical phrases using the word MAQQI, meaning "son of", which recurs across several stones. One stone bears an unusual cross motif whose arms terminate in trident-like prongs; another has a natural fissure in the rock that extends the line of an incised Latin cross down through the centre of the boulder, as though the stone itself had been chosen to complete the design. The enclosing drystone wall appears to have been added to an earlier earthen bank and fosse sometime between the 1840s and the 1890s, and access through it is still by means of two stiles, at the north and south-west, since no formal entrance was ever made through the wall.

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