Ecclesiastical enclosure, Monastery, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Monastery, Co. Wicklow

On a low rise in the undulating County Wicklow countryside near Monastery, what was once a place of organised religious life has been almost entirely reclaimed by vegetation.

The site retains only the faintest architectural memory of itself: a possible wall foundation running north to south, barely a metre wide and twenty centimetres above the ground, at the eastern end of a scatter of stones roughly twenty-seven metres across and fifteen and a half metres deep. A stone bank, two metres wide and just under a metre high, marks the northern edge of this irregular spread. That is more or less all that can be seen.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records an enclosure around the church at this location, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that typically defines an early Irish ecclesiastical site, demarcating the sacred precinct from the surrounding land. By the time fieldwork was carried out for the Archaeological Inventory of County Wicklow, no trace of that enclosure survived above ground. In 2007, archaeological test trenches were opened nearby during construction works for the Enniskerry water supply scheme, but they produced nothing of archaeological significance. The site offers no dramatic revelation, only the quiet persistence of a few stones on a gentle rise, and the knowledge that something deliberate once stood here and was eventually forgotten by everything except the cartographers.

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