Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killaduff, Co. Wicklow

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killaduff, Co. Wicklow

In a field in County Wicklow, the land remembers something the surface no longer shows.

The field itself is called 'Church Field', a name recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, and within it sits a D-shaped earthwork enclosure that once served as a graveyard. What makes it quietly odd is the absence of any grave-markers, any entrance, or any fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds enclosures of this type. The boundary is still legible, an earth and stone bank with drystone facing on its outer edge, measuring roughly 45 metres on its longer axis. But whoever lies within, if anyone does, left no inscription and no obvious way in.

Strangest of all is what the 1838 map shows but the ground does not. Surrounding the smaller enclosure, a much larger D-shaped boundary was recorded by the early surveyors, encircling the inner one at dimensions of around 80 by 90 metres. That outer enclosure has since vanished entirely at ground level, leaving only its cartographic ghost. This nested arrangement, a smaller sacred or burial space contained within a larger one, is a layout associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where an inner sanctum might be ringed by a wider precinct used for ancillary functions or settlement. The pattern suggests the site was once considerably more substantial than the modest earthwork visible today. Just to the west, the 1838 map also marks a feature labelled 'cave', identified as the possible site of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically constructed in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, its entrance and extent now unknown.

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Pete F
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