Ecclesiastical enclosure, Scariff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ecclesiastical Sites
A nineteenth-century house sits inside an early Christian enclosure on a small island five kilometres south-west of Hog's Head, at the mouth of Kenmare Bay.
That juxtaposition, the domestic and the devotional occupying the same oval of ground, is quietly disorienting, and it hints at how continuously this remote place has drawn people across the centuries.
Scariff Island's ecclesiastical site is reached by a path climbing uphill from the landing place known as Coosaneeve, or Cuas na Naomh, on the island's north-eastern shore. The name translates roughly as the cove of the saints, which already signals the site's character before you arrive at it. The enclosure itself is roughly oval in plan, measuring approximately 80 metres on its longer axis and 55 metres across, and its interior drops steeply downward to the south-east in two level terraces cut into the slope. The upper terrace retains intermittent stretches of a curving drystone revetment, a facing wall built to hold the terrace edge in place, rising to about 1.8 metres in places. On this upper terrace, marked as an oratory on Ordnance Survey maps, the low sod-covered foundations of a small rectangular building can be made out, measuring roughly 7.5 metres by 5.5 metres externally. Below it, on the wider lower terrace, the nineteenth-century house was built, delineated to the south-east by a later field wall that cuts across the earlier enclosure boundary. A burial ground also lies within the enclosure. Just outside it, to the south-west, is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, the function of which remains debated but likely included storage and refuge.
The path from Cuas na Naomh leads directly to the site, and the enclosure's southern arc, where it is crossed by a later field wall, is the clearest surviving stretch of the original boundary. To the north, curving field boundaries may trace the enclosure's former outline, though these are less certain. The sod-covered oratory foundations are easy to miss without knowing where to look, sitting as they do on the upper terrace amid the broader landscape of the island.