Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kildee, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ecclesiastical Sites
On a south-south-west-facing slope of hilly pasture in West Cork, a large earthen enclosure sits quietly in the landscape, its circular outline still legible after many centuries.
The bank that defines it rises to around 1.8 metres and encloses an area roughly 147 metres north to south and 136 metres east to west, making it a substantial feature by any measure. A shallow external fosse, the term for a ditch dug to reinforce a boundary bank, runs along its western side, and a gateway opens to the north-west. A disused roadway follows the eastern edge. What gives the site its particular character is not the outer enclosure alone, but the complexity of what survives inside it.
Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval Irish Christianity, when monastic or church communities established themselves within circular or roughly circular boundaries that served both practical and symbolic purposes. The interior here has been subdivided by a low earthen bank into three unequal sections, and each section contains its own features. A burial ground occupies the north-east quadrant. In the south-west there is a well, the kind of feature routinely associated with early church sites and sometimes with pre-Christian sacred landscapes absorbed into later Christian practice. Near the centre, a small circular area about eight metres in diameter is enclosed by its own grass-covered bank of earth and stone, a feature whose function is not entirely clear but which may represent a subsidiary enclosure or structure. A subrectangular area in the south-west, measuring roughly 16 by 10 metres, is defined by its own low bank and is described as heavily overgrown. Most intriguingly, a small mound joined to the southern bank by a low rise has a concentration of metal slag at its base, suggesting that at some point the site was associated with metalworking, an activity that in early medieval Ireland was sometimes carried out within or adjacent to ecclesiastical settlements, where craftsmen worked under ecclesiastical patronage.