Killiney, Killiney, Co. Kerry

A portion of a medieval baptismal font, likely belonging to the old parish church, was found built into an overground tomb. A carved stone from the same church has been repurposed as a gravemarker near the south-east corner of a building. A bullaun stone, one of those ancient boulders with a large circular hollow ground into the upper surface, possibly used for ritual or practical purposes going back to early Christian or even earlier practice, was once set into the graveyard wall itself; it has since been moved for safekeeping to the yard of the Roman Catholic chapel in Castlegregory. The place has a habit of absorbing its own history and then quietly redistributing it.

The church here, known in Irish as Cill Éinne or Cill Aighne, meaning the church of Aighne, appears in the Papal Taxation List for the diocese of Ardfert sometime between 1302 and 1307, which is the earliest written mention of it. By 1473 it had reportedly been vacant for a long time, though it turns up again in a list of parochial churches for the same diocese in 1622, suggesting some form of repair or revival in the intervening period. By 1756 it was in ruins again. The early nineteenth century brought a Church of Ireland church on the site, built directly south of the earlier structure. Stone foundations that once stood outside the south wall of the graveyard were locally regarded as the remains of an ancient monastery, a tradition recorded in 1946; those foundations were demolished when the graveyard was extended. The large rectangular graveyard itself may enclose the site of an Early Christian foundation going back considerably further than any of the documentary evidence. Standing beside the south wall of the modern church is a sandstone cross nearly three metres tall, dressed smooth on all sides, with hollowed angles at the junction of its arms. A holy well associated with the same saint, Tobar Einne, lies roughly 500 metres to the north.