Ecclesiastical enclosure, Selloo, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Selloo, Co. Monaghan

At the southern end of a small ridge in County Monaghan, a roughly circular grass-covered area about eighty to eighty-five metres across marks the ghost of an early Christian settlement.

The boundary is not a wall or a ditch in any dramatic sense, but a scarp, a low earthen shelf, best preserved along the northern and eastern arcs, where it still reaches around a metre in height and five metres in width. It is the kind of feature that can take a moment to read correctly in the landscape, the ground simply stepping down in a way that feels too deliberate to be natural.

The enclosure almost certainly predates the medieval field system that has since grown over it. Field banks running in from the north-east, south-east, south-west, and north-west converge on the burial ground at the centre, as though a later agricultural landscape quietly reorganised itself around something it could not entirely ignore. The early church associated with the site was probably founded by St. Molua in the sixth century. Molua, also known as Lughaidh or Lua, was an Irish monastic saint whose foundations appear in several parts of Ireland and Scotland, and the circular form of this enclosure is characteristic of early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, where a roughly round boundary, often called a cashel or rath-like enclosure, demarcated sacred ground. The burial ground at the centre is the most visible survivor of that original arrangement, the concentric logic of the place still legible even after centuries of agricultural reworking.

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Pete F
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