Church, Curreentorpan, Co. Roscommon

The bullaun, a boulde r or slab bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, was a common feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, sometimes associated with ritual use or cure. That this one has been quietly pressed into service to mark a burial, south of a ruined church that is itself little more than a grass-grown outline, gives the site at Curreentorpan an atmosphere of layered, accidental continuity. Nothing here announces itself; it simply persists.

The site is traditionally associated with a foundation by St Patrick, which places its origins, at least in legend, in the fifth century. What survives today is a small rectangular church, its internal dimensions running roughly eight metres by four, reduced to wall bases no higher than about sixty centimetres above ground. This sits at the western end of a rectangular enclosure that served for a long period as a cillín, or children's burial ground, a use common across Ireland for those who died unbaptised and were therefore excluded from consecrated ground. The enclosure is entered through a gap on its western side, marked by a large upright stone on its northern edge. What makes the layout particularly interesting is that this rectangular enclosure sits within, and shares its eastern boundary with, a much larger circular enclosure nearly sixty-six metres across. The circular form is the older type, characteristic of early Christian monastic sites in Ireland, where a roughly circular vallum or boundary wall defined sacred space. The fact that the two enclosures interlock rather than overlap suggests the rectangular arrangement was imposed on, or grew out of, the earlier circular one, a sequence of use compressed into the same small hilltop.

The site occupies the southern end of a northwest-southeast ridge, and the church ruin and its enclosures are grass-covered throughout, with much of what survives visible only as low spreads of stone and gentle earthen banks. The repurposed bullaun stone south of the church is perhaps the single most tangible object on the site, its carved basin still clearly legible despite its reassignment to a different kind of memorial purpose.