Religious house, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

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Religious Houses

Religious house, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

At the foot of an east-facing slope in County Wicklow, a quiet glade holds the grass-covered outline of a building that has gone largely unnoticed for centuries.

The foundations, roughly 18 metres by 16 metres, are all that remain visible of what the Ordnance Survey mapped, in both its 1839 and 1910 six-inch editions, as the site of a convent. No dedication survives, no founding date, no name attached to whoever once lived or prayed here.

What gives the site an added layer of peculiarity are the three bullaun stones found in the immediate vicinity. Bullauns are boulders or flat stones with one or more deliberately hollowed basins ground into their surface; they are associated with early Christian sites across Ireland, and their exact purpose remains debated, with suggestions ranging from liturgical use to the grinding of pigments or grain. One of the Kelshamore stones, placed centrally in the glade, is notably unusual in having three separate basins, where single-basin examples are the norm. A disused burial ground lies approximately 150 metres to the north-east, which, taken together with the bullauns and the mapped convent site, suggests this corner of Wicklow once formed a small but coherent religious landscape, the components of which have quietly outlasted any written memory of the community that made them.

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Pete F
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