Church, Cloghan, Co. Roscommon
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Churches & Chapels
At Cloghan in County Roscommon, a low-lying field holds the ghost of an early church that has no name in the historical record, only a local one.
The site is known locally as Taghshane, or Teach Sean, meaning roughly "old house" in Irish, which is itself a common folk description for a place whose original dedication has long been forgotten. What survives above ground is modest: a slight grass-covered platform, roughly nine metres by eight, barely rising above the surrounding soil. Yet beneath that understated surface lies the outline of something considerably more organised.
The platform sits at the centre of a D-shaped enclosure defined by an earthen bank with traces of a fosse, a shallow external ditch, on its eastern side. Enclosures of this shape are a characteristic feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, typically pre-Norman in origin, used to demarcate sacred ground from the surrounding landscape. A larger D-shaped enclosure, roughly 150 metres by 120 metres, surrounds everything, its boundary built up in layers: two banks separated by a level berm, a flat-bottomed fosse, and a low counterscarp bank on the outer edge, giving a total boundary width of around thirteen metres at the southeast. Running through this complex is an ancient roadway, some 120 metres of which survives, defined by earth and stone banks and silted drainage channels on either side. The road cuts across the inner enclosure and bends southwest just to its west, suggesting it pre-dates or was laid out in relation to the ecclesiastical boundaries. There is also a local tradition that the site served as a children's burial ground, a cillín, where unbaptised infants were interred outside consecrated ground, though no physical evidence of this use has been identified.