Ecclesiastical enclosure, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ecclesiastical Sites
On the southern slopes of Lateevemore, overlooking Ventry Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, there is an Early Christian enclosure that has been accumulating layers of human activity for well over a thousand years.
What makes it peculiar is not any single feature but the sheer density of objects crowded into a relatively modest space: a ruined church, hut foundations, graves, a holed stone, three bullaun stones (basin-shaped stones with deliberately ground hollows, probably used in ritual or medicinal contexts), a holy well, and an ogham stone that carries an inscription someone appears to have botched and then attempted to correct. The site is known as Kilcolman, or Cill na gColmán, the church of Colmán, and the circular earthen and drystone enclosure that defines it measures roughly 44 metres north to south by 47 metres east to west internally, with a two-metre entrance gap at the northwest.
The ogham stone near the southeast edge of the enclosure is perhaps the most absorbing object on the site. Ogham is an early medieval script used mainly in Ireland and parts of Britain, in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along a stem line, usually on the edge or face of a stone. Here, the stem line runs up the left side of the boulder's west face and across the top, framing two carved crosses beneath it. The inscription itself is, in the words of the scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, confused and puzzling; he proposed that the intended reading was ANM COLMAN AILITHIR, meaning roughly "in the name of Colman the pilgrim", and suggested the oddities in the carving resulted from mistakes made during execution and subsequent attempts to fix them. The main cross motif is a deeply carved cross of arcs set within a circle; three bullaun stones have since been collected from around the site and placed in front of it. A further cross-inscribed stone has been built into the lane wall just to the north of the enclosure, its cross with expanded terminals now functioning as anonymous boundary fabric. About 80 metres to the south, three springs mark the probable site of a holy well dedicated to St. Brendan. Curran recorded that organised pilgrimages to it had ceased by the early nineteenth century, though Françoise Henry, writing in 1937, noted that rounds were still being made.
The enclosure also served as a calluragh, a burial ground for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, a use that continued into the nineteenth century. The graves are concentrated in the southwest quadrant, marked by low mounds, upright stones, and prostrate slabs; two piles of quartz pebbles near the northeast corner suggest that area, too, was drawn back into funerary use at some point. The result is a site where Early Christian foundation, medieval devotion, and post-Reformation folk practice have all left their mark on the same enclosed hillside, none of it quite erasing what came before.