Qualla: Church Island (Valentia Harbour)

Church Island (Valentia Harbour): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An acre is not much land. Pace it out and you have a small suburban lot, the kind that might hold a house and a tidy garden. Now imagine an acre of bare rock rising out of a sheltered Kerry harbour, ringed by cold water and crossed by salt wind, and ask what kind of person chooses to live there. The answer, beginning sometime in the early medieval period, was a small community of Christian monks. They built a circular hut and a rectangular oratory of wood, then later replaced them in stone. They buried their dead, decorated their shrines with white quartz and Valentia slate, and ate, among many other things, ballan wrasse.

Church Island (Valentia Harbour): A Diet from the Sea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The middens, the kitchen rubbish heaps that archaeologists love, told a precise story when they were finally excavated. The monks of Church Island were not living on bread and prayer alone. The discarded shells and bones revealed a diet that mixed shellfish, cod, ballan wrasse, s...

Church Island (Valentia Harbour): Stone Crosses and the Ogham Inscription

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Excavation uncovered two stone crosses on the island and a number of cross slabs, including one carved with an ogham inscription, the angular Old Irish script of notches and lines along a stone's edge. Ogham is sparse and difficult to read, but every inscription is a window into ...

Church Island (Valentia Harbour): The Shrines

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2004, a second excavation turned up two more structures in the southern part of the island. The first is a gable-shrine, a stone box paved with Valentia slate and white quartz pebbles, measuring just under three metres across, holding the partial remains of four individuals. G...

Church Island (Valentia Harbour): The View Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Church Island sits a little under a mile north of Knightstown, immediately west of Beginish, easy to pick out from the deck of the ferry on a clear day. The State protects it as a National Monument. The buildings are gone, or rather they are eroded foundations and worn outlines n...