House - indeterminate date, Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

House

House – indeterminate date, Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

Within 300 metres of the sea-cliffs north of Dunquin Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, a roughly square enclosure of stone field walls encloses what looks, at first glance, like ordinary farmland.

Cultivation ridges still corrugate the interior, and the outlines of three or four possible house foundations survive as low banks of earth and stone, their walls long since robbed or collapsed. The site sits on the edge of Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, in an area known as Kilgobnet or Cill Ghobnait, and its date remains unresolved. What makes it quietly strange is not so much what is legible within it as what surrounds it: two large penitential cairns in a smaller, older sub-circular enclosure to the east, a stone cross carved into the face of a massive rock outcrop about 100 metres to the south-west, and a holy well, Tobar Ghobnait, roughly 120 metres further west again.

The whole complex is associated with St. Gobnait, an early Irish saint whose cult is particularly strong in this corner of Kerry. A penitential cairn, in this context, is a mound of stones accumulated by devotees as an act of penance or prayer, each stone added during the performance of rounds, a traditional ritual circuit made on hands and knees or on foot around sacred monuments while reciting prayers. According to J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, the larger enclosure measures approximately 47 by 48 metres internally and may itself be a relatively late addition, possibly no more than a field boundary imposed over an earlier sacred landscape. The house foundations within it, reduced as they are to barely perceptible earthworks, cannot be dated with any certainty. Rounds are still performed at the cairns, the cross, and the well on the 11th of February, St. Gobnait's feast day, making this one of the relatively few sites in Ireland where living devotional practice and ambiguous archaeology occupy the same ground simultaneously.

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