(Site of) Church, Kilcandra, Co. Wicklow

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(Site of) Church, Kilcandra, Co. Wicklow

In a ploughed field on a south-east-facing slope at Kilcandra in County Wicklow, a church once stood, and then it did not, and now there is nothing left to see at all.

No wall, no stone, no earthwork breaks the surface. The site exists today almost entirely as tradition and cartographic memory, which is its own kind of peculiarity.

What little is known comes from two sources published in the same year. O'Flanagan's 1928 edition of the Ordnance Survey Letters describes an enclosure, the roughly circular bank that would have defined the sacred precinct around the church, as approximately 45 metres in diameter with a bank around 1.2 metres high. That is a substantial earthwork, the kind of raised boundary, common around early Irish ecclesiastical sites, that can survive for centuries simply by being inconvenient to plough around. Yet Ronan, writing also in 1928, noted that the enclosure had apparently been levelled as early as 1830, which would explain why it appears clearly on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the great early surveys of the Irish landscape, but had already vanished from later editions. Within a decade of the surveyors recording it, the feature they drew was gone, or going. The church itself presumably disappeared earlier still, leaving only the enclosure as evidence, and then that too was erased.

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