Glebe, Kilmoney, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Glebe, Kilmoney, Co. Kildare

Somewhere in the townland of Kilmoney in Co. Kildare, a circle roughly 300 metres across lies folded into the ordinary working landscape of tillage fields and pasture, its outline so degraded that most people walking the land would never read it as a single coherent thing. What survives is a low, broad earthen bank, about seven and a half metres wide, that curves from the south-west around to the north-north-east before dissolving into a long, shallow scarp poached and softened by generations of livestock. An outer fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch associated with an enclosure, once girded the whole circuit; it has since been recut as a field drain and silted up almost entirely. A short arc of inner fosse is still faintly legible on the western side. The result is less a monument than a rumour in the ground.

The enclosure belongs to a class of large circular earthworks whose origins and precise function remain difficult to pin down without excavation. Local tradition holds that a church once stood somewhere within the interior, a detail that, if accurate, would suggest the enclosure served an ecclesiastical or at least a ceremonially significant purpose at some point in the medieval period. Just to the east lies a possible medieval field system, hinting that this corner of Kildare was actively organised and inhabited for a considerable stretch of time. Within the south-eastern sector of the main enclosure, a smaller trapezoidal enclosure survives, narrowing from east to west with an internal width of roughly 46.5 metres, its curving eastern side defined by another low earthen bank that actually overlies the perimeter of the larger enclosure, meaning it was added or modified later. Aerial photographs taken in 1967 and 1968 first helped document what ground-level inspection alone could not easily resolve. A broad gap of about twelve metres at the north-north-east may preserve the memory of an original entrance, though later agricultural activity has enlarged and blurred it considerably.

The site sits on a gentle north-facing slope, and the enclosure's bank now functions largely as a hedged field boundary, which is part of why it has survived at all, even in this reduced state. The internal topography is further complicated by a later field boundary bank and drain cutting across the eastern portion of the monument. What a careful eye might catch on the ground is the slight but consistent curvature of the hedgerow line, and the faint depression of the outer fosse running alongside it, most visible where the field drain has not entirely consumed it.

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