School, Gortnagane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Education & Learning
On a north-facing pasture slope in Gortnagane, County Kerry, there is almost nothing left to see.
A mound of tumbled stones pushed to one side of a field is all that remains of a structure that was already described, in the 1940s, as 'a much broken down cathairín known as Sean Cúirt' on the land of Denis J. Cremin. By the time it was formally noted, it had been oval in shape, roughly five metres by four, with a wall just over a metre wide, completely fallen. Sometime after that recording, field clearance removed even those remains. The site is not visible at ground level.
What makes this more than a footnote in a land-clearance history is what the name implies. A cúirt, in this context, was not a legal court but a bardic school or gathering place for poets; the word translates loosely as 'Court', referring to the annual assemblies at which poets and storytellers convened, often timed to coincide with a local festival or seasonal event. The sean in 'Sean Cúirt' simply means old or famous. Writing in 2001, scholar Cronin identified this particular ruin with a 'famous Court' said to have stood close by the foothills of Dhá Chích Danann, the twin peaks known in English as the Paps of Anu, and not far from a nearby enclosure site where, according to tradition, vast numbers assembled on May Day each year. The structure itself, Cronin noted, was oval and divided into two apartments, a layout consistent with a place designed for gathering and performance rather than domestic use.
The accumulation of stones still visible just to the east of where the structure stood is, in a practical sense, its grave marker. What was once, if the tradition holds, a place of annual poetic assembly in the shadow of one of Kerry's most mythologically freighted landscapes now survives only as rubble in a pasture field, its outline unreadable and its occasion entirely gone.