Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killarush, Co. Cork

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killarush, Co. Cork

A gentle grassy slope in north Cork holds more than it first lets on.

What looks like an ordinary pastoral field is in fact the remains of a D-shaped ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of curving earthwork that once marked out sacred Christian space in early medieval Ireland. The enclosure stretches roughly 70 metres on its north-to-south axis and projects around 100 metres to the east, its boundary defined partly by a curved earthen bank and partly by existing field boundaries that have quietly absorbed the older shape into the working landscape.

When a researcher named Bowman recorded the site in 1934, it still showed enough to be described as a double-ramparted D-shaped fort on the land of a P. J. O'Callaghan. Even then, however, the damage was considerable: Bowman noted that about two-thirds of the outer rampart had been levelled, along with practically all of the inner one. The intervening fosse, a shallow defensive or boundary ditch, was still traceable at around 14 feet wide. What survives today is more modest still: a curved bank rising roughly half a metre on its interior face and a metre on the exterior, with an external fosse to the east and south-east, and a gap of just over three metres breaking the bank to the south-east. The interior, now level pasture, once contained both a church site and a burial ground, placing this firmly in the tradition of early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures, where a roughly circular or D-shaped earthwork demarcated consecrated ground from the secular world outside. An additional curiosity appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map: a lime kiln, a simple stone structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural quicklime, is marked just inside the bank to the south-east, already noted at that date as disused and sitting on the south side of what was then still a visible inner rampart. No trace of it remains above ground today.

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