Enclosure, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On the lower eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, on the Dingle Peninsula, an oval enclosure sits quietly in the landscape, its boundary reduced in most places to a bank barely thirty centimetres high.

It would be easy to miss entirely, were it not for the northwestern stretch where a stone wall rises to two metres, its lower course built from noticeably larger stones that may belong to the original early medieval enclosure. Inside, field fences laid down by the nineteenth century have carved the interior into sections, partly obscuring the layout that earlier investigators tried to piece together. The enclosure known as An Cheallúnach, or Calluragh Burial Ground, contains within it a clochaun, a possible souterrain, at least one surviving cross-slab, and the memory of a second that now exists only as a rubbing held by the Royal Irish Academy.

A clochaun is a small dry-stone corbelled structure, the kind of beehive cell associated with early Christian monastic life along the western seaboard. The example here survives only in part; by 1899, when Macalister recorded it, the structure was apparently 3.05 metres in diameter, but today only the northwestern half remains, absorbed into the junction of the later field walls. Its lintelled doorway, just 0.67 metres high and 0.73 metres wide, now lies blocked. Local tradition, noted by both Curran and Macalister, held that a souterrain, an underground passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, once ran to the clochaun. The feature they identified as its probable remains was a stony ridge 5.4 metres long, known locally as the grave of Daire Donn, or Leaba Mhic Donn, names that suggest the ridge had accumulated its own mythology long before any archaeologist arrived to interpret it. Two stones set on edge near the centre of this ridge may be grave markers. The first of the surviving cross-slabs is a narrow rectangular pillar, 1.25 metres tall, inscribed on its eastern face with a cross bearing large circular expansions at the arms and shaft. Its western face carries a plain Latin cross surmounted by an unusual bar with a downturned rectangular projection. The second cross-slab, recorded by Crawford in 1912, carried a Greek cross with expanded ends alongside a saltire cross with double spiral terminals and small cup-and-circle motifs. Curran also noted the discovery of two quernstones, the paired grinding stones used to mill grain, though their present whereabouts are unknown. A further cross-slab stands against a field fence roughly 45 metres to the southeast, just outside the enclosure boundary.

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