Glebe, Baronstown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Ecclesiastical Sites
On a gentle south-west-facing pasture slope in Baronstown, the ground holds a secret that only reveals itself from the air. A circular enclosure roughly 65 metres in diameter, long since levelled and absorbed into ordinary farmland, reappeared in a 2018 Google Earth photograph as a cropmark, the differential growth of grass over buried archaeology tracing the ghost of a boundary that no longer exists at ground level. The north-eastern arc of that circle still functions as a townland boundary, which is itself a clue to how old and significant such features often are.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1838, labels the spot "Glebe", a term indicating land historically attached to a parish church and set aside for the support of its clergy. That designation, combined with a burial ground recorded within the enclosure, suggests this was once a site of some religious and communal importance. Writing in 1905, Sheil O'Grady described what remained at that point as a small piece of ground of about half an acre, enclosed by an old thorn fence, with the burial ground lying within. By then the enclosure was already a shadow of whatever it had once been, and since the earlier Ordnance Survey maps were made, a field boundary that formerly terminated at the western edge of the site has been pushed eastward to cut straight across its interior, north of centre. The monument itself has been levelled entirely, leaving nothing visible on the surface.