Ecclesiastical enclosure, Skeheenaranky, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Skeheenaranky, Co. Tipperary

On a south-east-facing slope in the Tipperary countryside, a D-shaped enclosure sits quietly beneath decades of accumulated scrub, its interior now a tangle of nettles, thistles, ferns, and brambles.

What gives the place its quiet peculiarity is the gap between what it looks like and what it likely was. The landowner knows it as "the Lios" or "the Lis", a term usually applied to a ringfort, the circular or oval earthwork enclosures associated with early medieval secular settlement in Ireland. But the field it occupies was recorded, as far back as 1908, under a name that points in a different direction entirely.

Power, writing in 1908, noted that the field was traditionally called "field of the early church". The enclosure is roughly fifty metres across on its north-west to south-east axis, with a straight north-east to south-west side running about eighty metres, giving it that distinctive flat-backed D-shape that is more commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites than with domestic ringforts. An ecclesiastical enclosure of this kind would have defined the sacred boundary of an early Christian settlement, separating the religious community within from the secular world beyond. The boundary wall, built with a rubble core and stone facing, has largely collapsed and now reads as a low, stony bank, still measurable at roughly half a metre above the interior ground level and over a metre on the exterior face. No fosse, the defensive ditch that often accompanies secular ringforts, is present. A neighbour identifies the site as a burial ground, and a separate record notes the former existence of a church within the enclosure, though no physical trace of any building remains visible above ground. In the north-west quadrant, a later roadway was cut parallel to the bank, with its own ditch and bank thrown up to define it, layering a more recent boundary over a much older one.

The monument sits in ordinary pasture, its edges overgrown and its interior inaccessible without some effort. The collapsed wall is most legible from the exterior, where the difference in ground level between inside and outside the enclosure is still perceptible underfoot. The absence of visible church remains or grave markers makes it easy to walk past without registering what the slight rise in the field boundary actually represents.

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