Enclosure, Kilcornan, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcornan, Co. Galway

In a field of pastureland on a gentle south-west-facing slope in Kilcornan, there is an enclosure that has been quietly dissolving back into the ground for centuries.

It is roughly subcircular in plan, measuring about 67 metres from north to south, and what remains of it is a low bank of earth and stone that curves around from the south-east through the west to the north, accompanied on the outside by a fosse, a shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the boundary. Several breaks in the bank look like modern interference rather than ancient collapse, which gives the site a slightly truncated quality, as though part of its story has been quietly edited out.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common early medieval monuments in the Irish landscape, typically associated with farmsteads or settlement activity from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, though dating individual examples without excavation is rarely straightforward. What adds some interest to this particular site is its association with a cillín, or children's burial ground, recorded separately in the county inventory and noted by Patrick O'Flanagan in 1927 and by a later account from around 1971. Cillíns were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered outside the formal rites of the Church, and they are frequently found in or near older enclosures, their communities apparently recognising something set apart in a place already bounded and separated from ordinary ground.

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Pete F
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