Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilkeaveragh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilkeaveragh, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Kilkeaveragh mountain, overlooking the Portmagee Channel, there is a small rectangular enclosure whose upright slabs bear no inscriptions whatsoever.

No names, no dates, no crosses. Dozens of stones mark what are almost certainly graves, yet they identify nobody. The enclosure itself, roughly 30.5 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, is bounded by a stony earthen bank that reaches three metres in height along its northern side, giving the place a quality that is less ruinous than quietly enclosed, as though it withdrew from the world rather than simply fell into disrepair.

At the heart of the site, raised noticeably above the surrounding ground in the south-west quadrant, stand the remains of a dry-stone oratory, a small roofed structure built without mortar. Its corbelled walls, constructed from large horizontally laid slabs averaging 1.3 metres thick, still rise to about a metre internally, and a doorway 0.75 metres wide opens through the western wall. Just outside that doorway lies a large flat slab, possibly the original lintel displaced at some point over the centuries. The oratory measures only 3.6 metres by 2.72 metres internally, barely large enough for a handful of people. The cluster of uninscribed grave-markers gathered around it suggests the site functioned as a ceallúnach, the Irish term for an early ecclesiastical burial ground associated with a local church or oratory, often used for unbaptised infants or others who fell outside conventional Christian burial rites, though that interpretation is not certain here. Whatever the precise nature of the community that used this place, the absence of any inscription on any stone makes it resistant to the kind of tidy historical narrative that named graves tend to produce.

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Pete F
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