Ecclesiastical enclosure, Glenquin, Co. Clare

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Glenquin, Co. Clare

On Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1920, this site in elevated, undulating pastureland in Glenquin, County Clare, is marked plainly as "Battle Field".

It is a striking label, and an entirely mysterious one. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1917, searched for any historical basis for the name and found none. Whatever memory or tradition attached itself to this place, it has not survived in any recoverable form. The site is, in fact, an ecclesiastical enclosure, a roughly circular boundary of the kind commonly built around early Irish monastic or church settlements, here estimated at around 130 metres in diameter.

The enclosure's southern and western perimeter survives as a substantial earthen bank, running approximately 104 metres on a northwest to southeast alignment, built from earth, gravel, and stone. Alongside it runs a fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, flat-based and still clearly defined. The northern arc of the boundary is less obvious on the ground but appears in satellite imagery as a curvilinear scarp stretching roughly 120 metres from west to east. Within the enclosure's northern interior stands the ruined Templepatrick church, accompanied by a graveyard, a holed stone, and, according to older maps and other sources, the site of what may have been a leper hospital. Holed stones are an intriguing category of early medieval object, sometimes associated with oath-taking, healing, or boundary marking, though their precise uses remain debated. The possible leper hospital adds another layer of complexity; such institutions were often sited at the margins of settlements, and their presence here, within a religious enclosure, is unusual enough to invite further thought, even if the historical record offers little to go on. Sheehan noted possible traces of the northern perimeter as early as 1982, before satellite imagery made them more legible.

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