Ecclesiastical enclosure, Tulla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ecclesiastical Sites
At the eastern edge of the village of Tulla in County Clare, a hillock carries rather more history than its modest elevation might suggest.
The crown of Tulla Hill is wrapped by an ecclesiastical enclosure roughly 150 metres by 135 metres in plan, oval in outline, and bounded on much of its circuit by a graveyard wall that sits atop a steep natural scarp nearly five metres high. That scarp is largely swallowed by trees and dense vegetation now, but where it breaks into the open it gives a clear sense of how the hill would once have read in the landscape: an elevated platform, visually distinct from the rolling pasture below, commanding views in every direction. On the south-western side the enclosure line has been interrupted since at least the mid-nineteenth century by the Fair Green, which softens what was once a more complete boundary into an open amenity space beside a car park.
The complexity of what sits within that boundary is easy to underestimate. A central laneway bisects the enclosure east to west, and off it lie a medieval church, an early eighteenth-century church built on the same central platform, a D-shaped historic graveyard, and the disputed site of a castle, which local tradition places within the graveyard itself while the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1911, marked it slightly further west along the laneway. Westropp also produced a scaled sketch plan showing the earthwork structure of the hill in some detail: an inner sub-circular scarp he labelled a 'church platform', a possible terrace opening out to the north-west and south-west, and a wider outer terrace at the base before the steep outer scarp. Those earthworks are now poorly defined, cut through by centuries of burial activity, but it is still possible to make out something of the church platform and, with patience, trace hints of the terracing below it within the historic graveyard. The researcher Myles, writing in 2009, pointed to evidence of counter-scarping on the eastern side of the hill, suggesting the site was deliberately fortified at some point, and noted that the field systems and roads visible on the flat land below are consistent with an early ecclesiastical enclosure of considerable extent.
The laneway from the car park is the natural way in, and it offers the best opportunity to read the topography. Looking south from the lane towards the historic graveyard, the slight rise of the church platform becomes just about legible beneath the headstones. The steep scarp is most visible at the south-east, where the vegetation thins enough to reveal the drop, and where the graveyard wall running along its crest makes the relationship between natural landform and human boundary unusually clear.