Ecclesiastical enclosure, Monaincha, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Monaincha, Co. Tipperary

About 450 metres west of the more celebrated Monaincha Abbey, in what was once the open water of Lough Cre, there is a raised area of bog enclosing the ghost of a separate sacred site.

The ground here holds the remains of a roughly circular enclosure, approximately 104 metres in diameter, whose defining bank has been worn down over centuries to little more than a low scarp, nowhere exceeding 0.6 metres in height. The southeastern quarter has been levelled entirely. It would be easy to walk across the site without quite registering what you were standing in, yet the circularity of early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures, the boundary line that separated sacred from secular ground, was itself a form of meaning, and something of that older geometry is still faintly legible in the landscape.

A map drawn by Ledwich around 1790 recorded a rectangular building on the island, oriented roughly east to west in the conventional manner of Christian worship. It was known traditionally as the "woman's church", a designation that sets it apart from the male monastic community associated with Monaincha Abbey nearby. By the end of the eighteenth century, according to D.F. Gleeson writing in 1947, the building had already been destroyed. The former lake, Lough Cre, had long since receded or been drained, and the island that once gave the site its physical separation from the surrounding world became simply a slightly elevated patch within the bog. The enclosure that defined it persisted in outline, even as everything built within it disappeared.

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