Ecclesiastical enclosure, Coolnaha, Co. Mayo

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Coolnaha, Co. Mayo

On a ridge in County Mayo, partly consumed by the drystone field walls of later farming generations, lies an ecclesiastical enclosure so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that its true character took decades to formally recognise.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map makes no mention of it at all; by the 1916 edition it had been recorded, though only as a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure, without any acknowledgement of its religious significance. It was aerial photography that eventually allowed a clearer reading of its shape: a broadly oval perimeter, roughly 115 metres east to west and 87 metres north to south, its boundaries now a palimpsest of original stonework buried beneath later field walls.

What survives of the enclosure boundary is a low stony rise, about two and a half metres wide, that protrudes from beneath the more recent walling on the south-west to north-east arc, while the eastern side is defined by a shallow scarp cut into the hillside, its upper edge marked by a rough line of stones breaking through the turf. The interior contains a remarkable concentration of features. A ringfort, the circular earthwork or stone enclosure typical of early medieval settlement in Ireland, occupies the north-west quadrant. In the eastern half there is a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a place set aside for the interment of unbaptised infants who were excluded from consecrated ground, and a bullaun stone, a boulder bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows whose precise function is debated but which frequently appears in early Christian contexts. Local tradition also places a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval occupation, somewhere within the enclosure. About twenty metres down the ridge to the east-south-east, at the base of the slope, a holy well adds another layer to what was evidently a significant sacred site, and immediately beside it stands the remains of what may be a horizontal-wheeled mill, a simple water-powered grain mill of a type common in early medieval Ireland.

The enclosure sits in pasture at the break of slope, with open grassland falling away to the west and a broad expanse of bog, now largely planted with forestry, visible to the east-south-east. A farm track skirts the eastern side, which makes the general area accessible, though the features themselves are embedded in working farmland and the boundaries require some patience to trace, much of the original stonework lying flush with or just beneath the surface of the ground.

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