Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilvarnet, Co. Sligo

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilvarnet, Co. Sligo

At Kilvarnet in County Sligo, there is an early ecclesiastical enclosure that can only be seen from the air, and even then only in a photograph taken more than half a century ago.

On the ground today, there is nothing to indicate its presence: no earthwork, no ridge in the grass, no boundary stone. The site exists, in any practical sense, only as a shadow captured on a single aerial image.

The enclosure came to light through a photograph taken in 1968 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. In that image, a roughly oval outline becomes legible, measuring approximately 250 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and around 200 metres across from northeast to southwest. Early ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind, typically circular or oval in plan, were the defining boundaries of early medieval monastic or church settlements in Ireland, marking off sacred ground from the surrounding landscape. What gives this particular example an added layer of interest is that its northwestern edge appears to coincide with the wall of a graveyard extension, suggesting the later burial ground was laid out with some awareness, conscious or not, of an older boundary. The graveyard, in effect, preserved a fragment of the earlier enclosure in its own perimeter.

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