Enclosure, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
A graveyard in Kilbride, County Wicklow, sits quietly on the north-eastern edge of a low ridge above the Brittas river, and it holds considerably more history than its eighteenth-century boundary wall might suggest.
Beneath the surface, and apparently lost entirely above it, lies what researchers believe was an Anglo-Norman parish church, a building for which not a single stone remains visible at ground level. What does survive, partly, is the outline of a much older enclosure: an earthen bank, 2.5 metres wide and 1.8 metres high, that predates the later graveyard wall and still runs along the eastern side of the site. These curvilinear earthen enclosures are a characteristic feature of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, marking a sacred boundary around a church and its associated ground long before formal stone walls became the norm.
The site clusters several layers of time together in a relatively small space. A font, which local tradition associates with this original ecclesiastical enclosure, no longer sits here; it was moved at some point to St Brigid's Church, about 200 metres to the west. Within the graveyard itself, the western sector contains an early graveslab, the kind of plain or lightly decorated stone marker associated with pre-Norman burial practice in Ireland. A cross-slab, a flat stone carved with a cross and typically dating to the early medieval period, was recovered from the same graveyard and is now held at the National Museum of Ireland under registration number 1970:189. The removal of the cross-slab to Dublin means the site has been quietly stripped of one of its more legible early Christian traces, leaving the earthen bank as the most tangible evidence of what once stood here.