Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cloon, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ecclesiastical Sites
At the inner end of the Cloon valley in south Kerry, a roughly circular earthwork barely knee-high from the outside encloses a small but unusually dense collection of early Christian stonework.
The enclosure is only about 35 metres across, its low bank overgrown and incomplete on the western side, yet what survives in the south-eastern quadrant amounts to something close to a catalogue of early medieval religious objects compressed into a very small space.
The focal point is a leacht, a low cairn-like monument of rough stone infill that in early Irish practice served as a memorial or devotional structure, sometimes associated with a saint's grave. This one, measuring roughly 2.75 metres by 2.3 metres and edged with upright slabs, contains a notable quantity of quartz, a stone with long-standing ritual associations in Irish sacred sites. Resting on its surface are two bullaun stones, boulders with deliberately carved circular depressions that were used for grinding or, more likely at a site like this, for collecting water believed to have curative or spiritual properties. Nearby, the foundations of a stone wall some 6.7 metres long may represent the remnants of a small building. The most intricate objects here, however, are two carved sandstone pillars. One was removed from the site in a broken state during the 1960s and is now held by the Office of Public Works; a replica was erected beside the leacht in 1989. The original is densely ornamented on all faces, combining equal-armed crosses, Latin crosses with expanded terminals, fret-patterns built from interlocking T-shapes, and two tetraskelions, four-armed rotating figures related in form to the swastika, which also appears on the pillar's square base. The second pillar, moved to stand beside the leacht by the OPW in 1989, carries Latin crosses, a triquetra-knot, further fret-patterns, and swastika motifs on its sides. Together they represent the kind of accomplished decorative vocabulary associated with early Irish monasticism, somewhere between manuscript illumination rendered in stone and the visual grammar of high crosses.
The site sits within a burial ground known locally as a killeen, a term often applied in Ireland to unconsecrated ground used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial. The interior, particularly the western half, is described as rushy and overgrown, and a wire fence crosses the southern portion. The stonework that survives is concentrated and largely accessible in the south-eastern corner, where the bank's internal stone-facing is still well preserved and the entrance at the north-north-east remains clearly defined.