Building, Garrannaguilly, Co. Kilkenny

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Utility Structures

Building, Garrannaguilly, Co. Kilkenny

High on the west-facing slopes of Garranagully hill in County Kilkenny, a field has carried two names in tandem for centuries: in English, the Churchyard or the Church-field; in Irish, Shanakill, meaning simply the old church.

The names are the clearest thing about it now. The monuments themselves have been swallowed by brambles, and the clearing where they stand is ringed by forestry, making it one of those places that is known about but effectively invisible.

The antiquarian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded what was still legible at the time. He described the foundations of an early church within a rectangular enclosure measuring roughly 39 metres by 30 metres, the building itself about 9 metres long and just over 5 metres wide. He dated it, cautiously, to the earliest times of Christianity in Ireland. Immediately to the south lay a second, somewhat smaller enclosure, with its own traces of foundations that Carrigan thought might belong to a monastery, a cell, or a priest's house. In his unpublished manuscript notes he was more precise about what the ground itself showed: two enclosures set parallel to one another, sharing a field fence as one of their sides. The northern enclosure, which he considered the more significant, retained a clear rampart and fosse, the fosse being the external ditch that typically accompanies an earthen bank, with the bank standing a few feet above the trench bottom. A low rise inside the northern enclosure he interpreted as the collapsed remains of mud walls. The southern enclosure was less well defined, its bank and ditch less pronounced, but both features shared the same east-west alignment. Carrigan also noted that the spot commanded an extensive view, which makes sense for a site positioned deliberately on an open hillside slope.

Today the bramble growth that covers the site is described as dense enough to obscure the monuments entirely, so anyone making their way there should expect more archaeology in principle than in practice. The earthworks and foundations lie within the clearing but are not accessible in any meaningful visual sense without significant clearance.

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