Kilcrohane Church (in ruins), Behaghane, Co. Kerry

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Churches & Chapels

Kilcrohane Church (in ruins), Behaghane, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-eastern slopes of Coad mountain, within a rectangular graveyard overlooking Kenmare Bay, stand the remains of a medieval parish church whose walls still reach full height on three sides, yet whose interior floor has risen over the centuries under the weight of its own dead.

The ground level inside is measurably higher than it once was, pushed up by extensive burials, and some of the 27 graves recorded there in a 2009 survey carry no names at all. Ivy smothers the east gable so thickly that the narrow round-headed window, nearly three metres tall and once fitted with glass and a wooden shutter, is barely visible from outside. A possible quern stone sits buried in one of the rubble piles on the floor.

The church appears in the Papal Taxation List of 1302 to 1306 under the diocese of Ardfert, already established enough to be a taxable entity. In 1398 the vicarage was appropriated to the Abbey of Killaha near Killorglin, meaning its revenues were formally assigned to that monastery. The church was still functioning in 1622, when it appeared in a diocesan listing, and in 1633 one Edwardus Grayne was recorded as minister for the parish alongside the neighbouring Templenoe. By 1756, Charles Smith noted it as already ruined. What survives internally is remarkably detailed for a building so long abandoned: a piscina, the shallow stone basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels, sits 0.6 metres from the east gable, its pointed head formed by two inclining slabs and its conglomerate basin retaining a central drain. Opposing corbels on the north and south walls are thought to have supported a rood-beam, the timber screen that in medieval churches divided the nave from the chancel. Beam-holes further west suggest a gallery or loft at that end, which one early commentator believed was reached by an external stair, though no trace of the stair remains. A blocked niche in the north wall, roofed with a pointed arch of pitched slabs, may have served as a tomb recess.

Just outside the north-west corner of the graveyard is Toberavilla, a holy well, one of three wells in the area traditionally visited on the 30th of July to mark the feast day of St Cróchán, the parish's patron saint. A shrine to the saint, carrying a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, stands nearby. To the south-west of the old church are the ruins of a later four-bay chapel, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as an R.C. Chapel and in somewhat better condition than the medieval building beside it, its plastered interior walls still partly legible beneath the encroaching grass and nettles.

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