Church, Churchland, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
On a ridge in County Wicklow, the ground drops sharply to the north and east while a large oval earthwork, roughly 100 metres by 65 metres, wraps around a ruined church and its graveyard.
The enclosure is defined on its eastern and western sides by an earthen bank about two metres high and three metres wide, with drystone facing still visible. There is no fosse, the surrounding ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures, which makes the site a little unusual. A raised path running between two ditches at the northwest may mark an original entrance. It has the proportions and form of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that in early medieval Ireland demarcated sacred ground, and something about the whole arrangement suggests a place that was carefully organised long before the roofless nineteenth-century church standing at its centre was ever built.
The saint commemorated here is Comán, son of Faolchú, connected by scholars with the Dál nAraidhe of northeast Ulster. He died in 747, and his feast day falls on 26th December. The 'law of St Comán', a form of ecclesiastical protection or tribute associated with his cult, was proclaimed across much of Connacht in 771, 779, and 792, and he is most closely identified with a monastic foundation now located in Roscommon town. His reach, in other words, extended well beyond Wicklow, which makes his presence here all the more intriguing. Irish speakers in the nineteenth century knew this place as Cill Chomáin, meaning the church of Comán, a name that appears on a map drawn by Neville in 1760 and identifies it as the parish church of Kilcommon, in the diocese of Ferns. The ruined structure visible today dates from the early nineteenth century, and no physical trace of any earlier church survives above ground. A cylindrical block of granite sits just outside the southwest corner, its original function unclear, and a scatter of miscellaneous architectural fragments lies nearby. The graveyard holds a considerable number of mid-eighteenth-century headstones, modest in their way but forming a coherent record of a community that continued to bury its dead here long after the medieval world that shaped this place had passed.