Ecclesiastical enclosure, Brackloon, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ecclesiastical Sites
Near the summit of a hill in north Galway, looking out over open bogland, a low earthen scarp traces the ghost of what was once a substantial ecclesiastical enclosure.
The enclosure, now roughly circular and about 78 metres across, is the kind of site that rewards a second look: its western arc has been almost entirely eaten away by gravel pits cut along its line, and what remains is fragmentary enough that it could easily be mistaken for a natural rise in the ground. Only at the northern side do traces of an external fosse, a defensive ditch about 8 metres wide, hint at the scale of what once stood here.
When the antiquarian Neary recorded the site in 1914, considerably more was visible. He described a large cashel, that is, a stone-walled enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical or secular settlements, whose wall was some 6 feet thick and whose overall dimensions he estimated at roughly 300 by 400 feet, or about 91 by 122 metres. The comparison with what survives today is a quiet measure of how much has been lost in the intervening century, mostly to those gravel extractions at the western edge. At the centre of the enclosure, a church and its rectangular graveyard still occupy the interior, as they presumably have for many centuries, the sacred core of a complex that once had substantial stone boundaries defining its limits.