Ecclesiastical enclosure, Garranmillon, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Ecclesiastical Sites
On an east-facing slope in County Waterford, overlooking a river basin, sits an enclosure that presents something of a puzzle. It surrounds an early church site, looks the part of an ancient ecclesiastical boundary, and yet the earth and stone banks that define it were built in the late nineteenth century. The rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly 32 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, carries the appearance of antiquity without the substance of it; there is no evidence of burial within, and no trace of any original enclosure beneath or around the later construction.
The banks were raised sometime before 1896, the date at which they appear in Barry's published record. They stand between half a metre and a metre in height internally, with a width of around three metres, giving them a solidity that can easily mislead. What does survive from an earlier period are traces of an external fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, detectable to the south-west and west and at the eastern end of the northern side. These fragments hint at something older underlying the site, even if the visible structure above ground is a Victorian intervention. The early church itself sits within this enclosure, its origins predating the neat rectangular earthwork that now frames it. Just to the north of the enclosure stand two ogham stones. Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge of a stone, and its presence here alongside a church site suggests that this ground carried significance well before the nineteenth-century tidying-up began.