Ecclesiastical enclosure, Gortavoher, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ecclesiastical Sites
A field called 'The Kill' is rarely a neutral piece of local nomenclature.
In County Tipperary, on wet and rushy ground at the foot of Slievenamuck, one particular patch of farmland carries that name, and during ploughing, bones were turned up here, as recorded by Weir in 1980. The name itself is telling: 'Kill' derives from the Irish 'cill', meaning a church or monastic cell, and it points to the likelihood that this unassuming agricultural corner was once the site of an early ecclesiastical enclosure.
Only the north-eastern quadrant of the enclosure remains legible at ground level, defined by a low scarp roughly two metres wide and half a metre high, with an external fosse, a shallow ditch, running alongside it. These are modest dimensions, but the form is consistent with the kind of curvilinear enclosure that once bounded early Irish church sites. The enclosure measures approximately 28 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west in the surviving quadrant, and an east-west field boundary now cuts straight through it, dividing history from working farmland. South of that boundary lies 'The Kill', and the ground there slopes gently southward in a way that may trace the outer edge of what the enclosure once enclosed. Just to the north sits a bullaun stone, a basin-shaped hollow ground into a boulder, objects commonly associated with early Christian and pre-Christian sacred sites in Ireland, where they were used for grinding, ritual, or both. Its proximity here is unlikely to be coincidental. The whole site sits below a local rise known simply as 'the Nob', at the southern base of Slievenamuck, terrain that is flat, damp, and easily overlooked.