Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilconnor, Co. Cork

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilconnor, Co. Cork

A field boundary in north Cork is doing double duty, holding livestock in on one side and holding history in on the other.

On a south-facing pasture slope at Kilconnor, the arc of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the circular earthen bank that once defined the sacred precinct around a church, has been quietly absorbed into the working field system. The bank itself survives to a height of about 0.8 metres and runs in an arc from the north-west to the north across roughly 50 metres, with a fosse, or external ditch, on its outer side. A separate curved section of earth and stone fence immediately to the east of the church site may preserve a further fragment of what was either an inner enclosure or the original graveyard boundary.

This kind of circular ecclesiastical enclosure is a recurring feature of the early Irish church. Monasteries and church sites were typically bounded by a roughly circular vallum, demarcating the sanctified ground within from the secular world beyond, and traces of these enclosures can sometimes be read in the landscape long after the buildings themselves have vanished. At Kilconnor, the church has gone, but the shape of its precinct lingers in the hedgerows. Writing in 1932, a researcher named Power noted that the outline of a former circular enclosing bank was still faintly traceable, both in the field fence to the north and in what he called the field surface itself, on what was then Regan's farm. The fact that he could read it then, and that portions of it remain identifiable today, suggests a remarkable persistence in the local field layout, one that has preserved ecclesiastical geometry within an entirely agricultural context.

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