Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cooryeen, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cooryeen, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Cooryeen in south-west Kerry, there is a site that has effectively erased itself from the landscape.

What was once a roughly oval ecclesiastical enclosure, measuring approximately 85 metres east to west and 55 metres north to south, is no longer legible at ground level. The enclosing bank has been levelled entirely, and what survives is not a place you can walk around and read easily, but a ghost, visible only from the air.

The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, marked with a broken line suggesting even then it was only partially traceable. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this type are the footprints of early Irish monastic or church settlements, where a raised bank or wall defined a sacred boundary separating the religious precinct from the surrounding land. By the time the area was resurveyed in 1895 to 1897, the enclosure had disappeared from the map altogether, with only a rectangular burial ground in its north-eastern quadrant still recorded. That burial ground, overgrown at the time, sits at the junction of a townland boundary and a small stream, both of which now cross what was once the western half of the enclosure, while a field boundary bisects the eastern half. The slow accumulation of these working boundaries tells its own story of how an early ecclesiastical site gets quietly dismantled and absorbed into ordinary agricultural land over centuries. The clearest evidence the enclosure ever existed came from an aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which a cropmark, the faint east-west shadow of the levelled bank showing through growing crops, traces the outline of what once stood there.

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Pete F
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