Leacht, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry

Beside it, just two metres to the west, a neat north-south row of further slabs stretches for five metres, each one standing somewhere between knee and waist height. The arrangement is quiet and deliberate, the kind of thing that rewards a second look.

The feature is known as a leacht, a term for a low cairn or mounded structure associated with early Christian sites in Ireland, often understood as a place of devotional practice or commemoration, sometimes linked to the memory of a particular holy person. The building it sits beside is recorded as a possible oratory church, one of those small, plain rectangular structures that dot the early medieval religious landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula. That peninsula, running out into the Atlantic in the far south-west of Kerry, holds one of the densest concentrations of early medieval ecclesiastical remains in the country. The specific arrangement at Feaghmaan, with both a mounded leacht and an associated standing row of slabs, was noted in Françoise Henry's 1957 work on the area, and later documented in the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996.