Chapel in Chapel Island Little

A sixteenth-century map of Bantry and Beara (Breen 2005, frontispiece) shows a small chapel at the north-eastern end of Chapel Island (little). This may be the church of Iniscuingi that was listed in a decretal letter of 1199 and a possession of Gill Abbey (CO074-036----) in the late medieval period (ibid., 175-7). Breen, C. (2005) The Gaelic Lordship of the O’Sullivan Beare, Four Courts Press. The following description of the site was submitted to ASI by the archaeologist Tony Miller on 25th June 2012. “I visited Chapel Island on the 28th April 2012 and found that the two halves of the island are now just about separated at high tide. There is no land between them, only a shingle beach. At the eastern tip of the western half of the island (Chapel Island Little) is a ruined house standing on a level terrace of land. It has the beach immediately to the east of it and the steep slope of the island to the west. The terrace is large and rectangular in shape, revetted by a well built dry-stone wall for c. 40m along the northwest side (the two corner returns are visible) and by another section c. 0.8m in height, 0.75m in width and c. 7m in length, on the north-east side. This last section of walling is fragmentary and there is no sign of an eastern corner and similarly there is no evidence for a south-eastern wall which has probably been eroded away by the sea. Of further note, there is a simple boundary wall, or possibly a breakwater, running out into the sea from the southwest corner of this retaining wall. A portion of the enclosed area is occupied by the ruins of a long stone built house in ruins. It is on a similar northeast, southwest alignment as the larger enclosure. The eastern half of the building appears to be the oldest part, built in a dry stone fashion with a small widow in the northwest wall and a doorway in the middle of the south east wall. Its external measurements are c. 5.2m in width and c.10m in length. At a later date it was extended to the southwest with an extension c. 6m in length. This is also built of field stone but with lime mortar for bonding. This extension also has a single window in the southwest wall and a doorway in the northeast wall. The two parts are not connected internally. This building has only a narrow strip of land remaining between it and the pebble beach along its south-eastern side. To the north-west of the oldest part of the building is an enclosed yard of the same length extending out to the larger enclosing wall. There is nothing to suggest that the oldest part of the building could have been the chapel depicted on the map, however, I would wonder if the fragmentary larger enclosure be related to the church site/burial ground. It is well built and surrounds a levelled area.”