Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilmartin, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Ecclesiastical Sites
A road bends for no obvious reason through the flat tillage land near Kilmartin in County Dublin, and that gentle curve is just about the only thing left to tell you that an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure once occupied this ground.
The physical remains were levelled sometime between 1971 and 1976, and today there is no visible surface trace whatsoever. What survives is essentially a ghost, legible only from the air.
Aerial photography has been the primary means of recovering what was lost. Two separate photographs, referenced in the archaeological record as OS 8/7584 and GB89.AE.10, reveal a curvilinear enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary, typically defined by earthen banks and ditches, that characterised early Irish church sites from the early medieval period onward. At Kilmartin, the enclosure appears to have consisted of two widely spaced fosses, that is, ditches, surrounding the church site itself. There is also evidence of a possible outer enclosure, orientated roughly east to west at approximately 150 metres in length and 110 metres north to south in width. It is the outer edge of this enclosure that the modern road still traces, curving around its western arc in a manner that suggests the boundary was respected long after the ecclesiastical community it once defined had disappeared. This kind of indirect survival, where a road or field boundary unconsciously preserves the memory of a much older feature, is not unusual in the Irish landscape, though it rarely announces itself.
For anyone visiting the area, expectations should be set accordingly. There is nothing to see at ground level; the site sits within an agricultural landscape that has also seen large-scale removal of field fences in recent decades, which means even the patchwork of smaller enclosures that might once have helped orient a visitor is largely gone. The real point of interest is conceptual: standing at the roadside and watching the tarmac curve where it does, knowing that curve follows a boundary laid out perhaps a thousand or more years ago around a place of worship now entirely erased from the surface. The aerial photographs held in the archives remain the clearest window onto what once existed here.