Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cullentragh Park, Co. Wicklow

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Cullentragh Park, Co. Wicklow

In Cullentragh Park, on a level shelf of ground between the Avonbeg River and the steep valley side rising to the north-east, an oval earthwork sits quietly in the landscape with almost nothing to announce its purpose.

No church survives, no graveyard, no carved stone. What remains is a fosse, the kind of broad defensive ditch that typically encircled early Irish ecclesiastical sites, here measuring seven to eight metres wide and around one and a half metres deep on its western and south-eastern arcs, with the natural slope of the valley doing the equivalent work on the northern side. A narrow causeway, three metres wide, crosses the fosse at the south, suggesting that this was once the formal entrance into a bounded, possibly sacred, space.

The enclosure itself is oval, roughly forty metres along its north-west to south-east axis and thirty metres across. That shape, and the proportions of the fosse, are characteristic of early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where a roughly circular or oval boundary, a ráith or cashel in other materials, demarcated the monastic or church precinct from the surrounding land. Liam Price, writing in 1945, identified this as the site of an early church, though he offered little elaboration. Price was a careful and methodical recorder of Wicklow antiquities, so the attribution carries some weight even if no structural evidence of the church itself is visible today. When exactly it functioned, which community it served, and what became of any buildings within the enclosure are questions the site keeps to itself.

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