Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilriffet, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilriffet, Co. Tipperary

On a hillside in north Tipperary, one of the more quietly puzzling early Christian sites in the county exists almost entirely underground, or rather, just beneath the surface of perception.

The only trace visible from the air is a D-shaped cropmark, roughly 54 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, the kind of ghostly outline that shows up when differential soil moisture causes crops to grow unevenly over buried features. At ground level, there is nothing to see at all.

About 100 metres to the east of the enclosure's centre, however, a large flat stone sits embedded in the earth. It measures just over a metre across and is roughly a third of a metre thick. Cut into its surface is a long rectangular slot, 84 centimetres in length and only 13 centimetres wide, into which eight water-rolled, oval or spherical stones have been deliberately jammed. Beside the slot there is a shallow circular depression, which fits the description of a bullaun, a type of stone basin found at early Christian sites across Ireland and often associated with ritual or healing purposes. Scattered around the base of the stone are further small water-rolled pebbles and loose angular fragments, some of which may simply be field clearance debris. Local tradition, however, held this to be a mass-rock, one of the flat or prominent stones used as improvised altars during the Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Catholic worship was banned and priests conducted services in the open countryside. The townland name itself, Kilriffet, carries the Irish element "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, which taken alongside the bullaun stone and the enclosure outline, points toward an ecclesiastical site of some kind, likely early medieval in origin, that has left almost no physical trace above the soil.

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