Ecclesiastical enclosure, Nohaval, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ecclesiastical Sites
On a south-facing slope above the River Blackwater in north Cork, a scattered group of monuments occupies the same ground without quite forming the coherent enclosed site you might expect.
There is a round tower, a graveyard, the site of a church, and what may be a souterrain beneath the tower's foundations, yet the boundary that would normally unite them into a recognisable early ecclesiastical enclosure has largely disappeared. The clearest hint that an enclosure once existed here is not a wall or a bank but simply the curve of the road to the northwest and southwest, which may preserve the arc of an older perimeter.
A sketch from the Ordnance Survey archives dated 1844, recorded by Walsh, shows what was then labelled the site of old churchyard walls. It depicts a north-to-south wall connecting the northwest corner of the church with the round tower and forming the western side of a rectangular enclosure roughly 17.5 metres north to south and 37.5 metres east to west, set on the north side of the graveyard. The interior of that enclosure was described at the time as being more irregular than any other portion of the same field, a phrase that hints at disturbed or built-up ground. Writing in the same year, O'Flanagan noted that the walls of a structure outside the graveyard, apparently a dwelling of what he called the castellated kind, were said to have been standing to a considerable height as recently as around 1800. The round tower itself, a type of tall, tapering stone structure associated with early Irish monasteries and used variously for lookout, bell-ringing, and refuge, survives on the higher ground towards the northern end of the site. A possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind often found in early medieval ecclesiastical and settlement contexts, lies beneath it. Further objects recovered from the surrounding area add texture to the picture: a pair of large quern stones, each two and a half feet in diameter, were found in a field to the southwest of the graveyard, and a wooden bowl, sixteen inches across and five inches deep, came up from a bog nearby. Quern stones, used for hand-grinding grain, are a commonplace find on early medieval sites and suggest the ordinary, practical life that ran alongside the religious one.