Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killeenmunterlane, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killeenmunterlane, Co. Galway

In a field of rough grazing land in County Galway, a low, overgrown bank traces the outline of something that was once deliberately enclosed.

The shape is subcircular, roughly 77 metres east to west and 72 metres north to south, and it belongs to a category of site that quietly punctuates the Irish countryside: the early ecclesiastical enclosure, a roughly circular boundary that once defined the limits of a monastic or church settlement. This one is poorly preserved, its defining bank of earth and stone long since collapsed and grown over, but the form is still legible if you know what to look for.

Within the enclosure, the remains of a church sit in the south-east quadrant, and a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, is also associated with the site. A cillín was typically used for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under older Church practice, and their presence beside early churches is not uncommon across the west of Ireland. When the scholar McCaffrey examined the site in 1952, he recorded what appeared to be the remains of hut sites near the church, along with internal field walls radiating outward from its walls, suggesting the kind of organised internal layout seen at other early monastic enclosures. By 1983, no surface trace of these features remained. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, described the place as a small early monastery site, a designation that places it within a wider pattern of modest, localised religious foundations that once served rural communities across Connacht. A re-inspection in June 2013 found that some clearance work had taken place in the southern half of the enclosure, and that this activity had caused damage both to the inner face of the enclosing bank and to the church remains themselves.

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