Ecclesiastical enclosure, Ballagh, Co. Wicklow

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Ballagh, Co. Wicklow

In a grass field on a gently sloping hillside in County Wicklow sits an oval enclosure whose most striking object is also its most damaged.

A granite cross-slab, nearly a metre tall and pointed at the head, lies partially broken, its severed head resting beside the shaft on the ground. One face once carried a crucifixion figure carved in low relief, but by the time Liam Price recorded the site in 1945, that image had already worn to invisibility. Beside it, small uninscribed grave-markers are arranged in rows, their anonymity a reminder of how much early ecclesiastical sites have shed over the centuries.

The enclosure itself is oval, roughly 45 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 30 metres across, a shape that is characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where the boundary bank defined sacred ground rather than merely marked a property line. Here, that bank is earthen, with drystone facing on the better-preserved south-western side, and reinforced by a shallow external fosse, a ditch that runs around the perimeter, though it has disappeared at the north-eastern arc. Two gaps interrupt the bank, one to the north with traces of drystone facing, and one to the south that is more elaborately arranged, with squared-off bank terminals, a probable causeway across the fosse, and a ramp rising into the interior. That southern entrance, with its deliberate approach, suggests the enclosure was designed with procession or formality in mind, not simply convenience.

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Pete F
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