Church, Killaduff, Co. Wicklow

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Church, Killaduff, Co. Wicklow

A church that has left no trace above ground, a graveyard with no grave-markers, and an outer enclosure that has vanished entirely from the landscape while surviving only on a map drawn in 1838: the ecclesiastical site at Killaduff in County Wicklow is most notable, in a sense, for what is no longer there.

What remains is a D-shaped earthen enclosure, roughly 45 metres along its longest axis, defined by a bank of earth and stone with drystone facing on its outer side. No fosse, the defensive ditch that often accompanies such enclosures, has been identified, and there is no obvious entrance. The field itself still carries the name "Church Field" on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which is, practically speaking, more durable evidence of former religious activity than anything visible on the slope today.

The 1838 map records something else now lost: a second, much larger D-shaped enclosure, measuring approximately 80 by 90 metres, which once ringed the smaller one concentrically. This outer boundary has left no impression at ground level, suggesting either deliberate removal or centuries of gradual erosion and agricultural levelling. Immediately to the west of the graveyard enclosure, the same map marks a feature labelled simply "cave", now interpreted as the site of a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement and often used for storage or refuge. The church that gave the field its name has vanished so completely that no structural remains survive, leaving the low enclosing bank as the sole indication that this gentle east-facing slope once held something of religious or communal significance.

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