Ecclesiastical enclosure, Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

A quarry dug in the early 1980s, measuring roughly 35 metres by 40 metres and two to three metres deep, appears to have destroyed most of a medieval church that once occupied the northern quadrant of an ecclesiastical enclosure on a south-west-facing slope in the Tipperary uplands.

The graveyard associated with the church, positioned to the south of where the building stood, survives in the surrounding grassland, but the church itself is effectively gone, replaced by a hole in the ground of relatively recent making.

What remains is a shallow fosse, the term for a flat-bottomed ditch used to define the boundary of an enclosure, detectable about 16 metres to the north of the quarry and visible only along a western-to-north-eastern arc. The enclosure it describes is approximately 95 metres across, and its character suggests it may originate in the Early Christian period, when such curving ditched boundaries were commonly laid out around monastic or ecclesiastical sites. The first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded boundary ditches both to the north and south of the church, though the northern one had already disappeared from later editions, suggesting gradual loss over time. The site sits within the Parish of Kiltinahy, a placename derived, according to nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey correspondence, from the Irish Cill tSinche, meaning the church of St Sinech. A raised-platform ringfort lies 105 metres to the south-south-east, placing the ecclesiastical enclosure within a wider landscape of early settlement.

The fosse is subtle, with a top width of only 4.5 metres and an external depth of just 0.3 metres, so little about this place announces itself. The open views from east through south to west, across the upland terrain, give some sense of why this south-west-facing slope was chosen for settlement, even if almost everything built here has since been lost or quarried away.

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