Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cloghan, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cloghan, Co. Roscommon

What looks, at first glance, like a slight irregularity in the grass of a low-lying Roscommon field turns out, on closer inspection, to be one of the more quietly complex pieces of early ecclesiastical landscaping in the county.

Near Cloghan, a D-shaped enclosure roughly 150 metres along its longer axis encloses not just the remains of a church but also traces of an ancient road, all sitting on a gentle slope that falls away to the north and east. The enclosure is grass-covered now, but its underlying structure is surprisingly elaborate for something so unassuming from a distance.

The boundary is not a simple bank and ditch but a layered sequence of earthworks. Moving outward from the interior, there is a first earthen bank, then a berm, a flat space separating it from a second and more substantial bank beyond, then a flat-bottomed fosse, which is essentially a defensive or boundary ditch, and finally a counterscarp bank on the outer edge. At the south-east, where the sequence is best preserved, the whole arrangement spans some 13 metres in total width. The innermost bank stands only about 0.2 metres high, but the outer bank rises to 1.2 metres on its exterior face, giving it considerably more presence than the modest interior suggests. This kind of multi-element enclosure boundary is characteristic of early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where the enclosed ground was understood as sacred space requiring clear, graduated demarcation from the secular landscape outside. The south-western and north-western sections of the perimeter have been disturbed by later field walls and land reclamation, which is a common fate for earthworks that sat in agriculturally productive ground.

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