Ecclesiastical enclosure, Ballyclogh, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Ballyclogh, Co. Wicklow

On a west-facing slope in County Wicklow, somewhere beneath ordinary pasture, lies the ghost of an early ecclesiastical settlement.

There is nothing to see at ground level, no upstanding walls, no legible stonework, no visible trace of any kind. Yet the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 records the site quite deliberately, labelling it as the location of both a church and a graveyard, and showing both within the outline of a circular enclosure roughly 55 metres across at its widest point.

That circular boundary is the detail worth pausing on. Enclosures of this form, typically defined by a curving earthen bank or fosse, are a recurring feature of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. They mark out a sacred precinct, separating the ground within from the secular world outside, and their rounded shape is thought to reflect very early, possibly pre-Norman, origins. The Ballyclogh enclosure fits that pattern. The church and graveyard it once contained are noted in Liam Price's 1967 work on Wicklow placenames and antiquities, though by the time the Ordnance Survey mapmakers came through in the 1830s, even they could only record a site rather than a functioning or structurally intact place.

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