Enclosure, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cill Ura Thoir, Co. Kerry

A laneway now cuts straight through what was once a church and burial ground on the southern edge of Kildurrihy village in west Kerry.

Known in Irish as An Teampall Beag agus An CheallĂșnach, meaning the small church and the burial ground, the site today presents itself as little more than an oval patch of rough, untended ground. There is almost nothing to signal that it once held numerous graves, headstones, and the foundations of two distinct rectangular buildings.

Earlier documentation paints a more legible picture. The Ordnance Survey Name Books recorded a roughly circular enclosure some 120 feet, or 36 metres, across, partly ringed by a stone wall, with graves and headstones filling the interior. The foundations of the larger of the two buildings spanned about 60 feet at their greatest extent, with walls nearly a metre thick; the smaller measured roughly 15 by 9 feet. By 1910, when the architectural historian Arthur Champneys visited, even those remnants had largely disappeared into the landscape. What remained of one church wall had been absorbed into an adjacent field boundary, a common fate for early ecclesiastical stonework in rural Ireland, where building material was rarely left unused for long. Beside that repurposed wall, a stone slab survived bearing an incised cross-in-circle, a simple decorative motif associated with early Christian sites throughout the region.

The Dingle Peninsula is unusually dense with early medieval ecclesiastical remains, and sites like this one, a calluragh or unconsecrated burial ground associated with a small local church, were once a common feature of the Irish countryside. The enclosure at Cill Ura Thoir is now largely invisible, its outlines readable only if you know to look for the slight irregularity of the ground and the line of the old laneway passing through it.

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Pete F
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