Church, Glasnamullen, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Glasnamullen, Co. Wicklow

At Glasnamullen in County Wicklow, an early ecclesiastical site has been so thoroughly absorbed by the working landscape around it that only the most careful eye would notice anything at all.

A farm track cuts straight through the middle of it. A farmyard wall sits on top of one of its earthen banks. The church itself survives only as a barely perceptible rise in the ground, a low bank no more than ten to twenty centimetres high, tracing a rectangle roughly nine and a half metres long and five metres wide. What you are looking at, in other words, is a building that has effectively returned to the earth.

The site is more complex than that modest outline suggests. The church footprint lies on a slightly raised platform towards the western end of the enclosure, and this in turn sits within a D-shaped graveyard, the southern and western edges of which are defined by an earth and stone bank with a near-vertical drystone facing on the outside. That graveyard is itself contained within a larger oval enclosure, the outer edge of which is now only a slight scarp, a faint step in the ground, visible to the east of the farm track. A shallow fosse, essentially a ditch, runs around the south-western corner of the outer boundary. This kind of nested arrangement, a church within a graveyard within an enclosure, is characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where successive boundaries marked gradations of sacred space. Beside the church platform lies a hexagonal block of granite, measuring about seventy-three centimetres long and thirty centimetres thick, with a shallow basin cut into its upper surface but no drainage hole. Whether it functioned as a baptismal font or as the base for a standing cross is unresolved, but its careful shaping and deliberate placement suggest it was never merely a field stone.

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