Ecclesiastical enclosure, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

On the southern side of a quiet valley between the western spurs of Brandon Peak and Ballysitteragh mountain, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits almost entirely filled with the dead.

This is a calluragh, a type of early Christian burial ground that continued to receive the unbaptised, most often infants, well into the modern era. The graves here are low mounds, typically between 1.25 and 1.5 metres long and half a metre high, many of them marked at their east and west ends by small upright stones. The enclosing wall has largely collapsed to a rubble band no more than half a metre high, though the entrance gap on the east-south-east side is still framed by two large upright slabs, each around 1.25 metres high, one set at right angles to the other, as if the threshold itself was being formally declared.

Within the enclosure, the foundations of three small stone huts survive among the graves. One rectangular structure abuts the western wall, another is roughly circular with an east-facing entrance, and a third, oval in plan, sits in the south-eastern quarter with entrance gaps to both north and south and traces of an internal dividing wall. These are the kinds of cells associated with early monastic or hermitic settlement, modest in scale and entirely in keeping with the remote character of the valley. Two cross-slabs have also been recorded at the site. The first, a coffin-shaped stone just 70 centimetres long, lies loose on one of the graves and carries a Latin cross with expanded terminals on one face. The second stands upright on a sub-circular cairn about ten metres east of the enclosure; both of its faces are carved with a cross set within a circle, the lower arm extending beyond the circle to end in a very faint pelta motif, a decorative curving form associated with early medieval stonework. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, though the enclosure and its cairn appear to belong to a considerably earlier tradition of Christian settlement in this part of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula.

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