Ecclesiastical enclosure, Derrydonnell More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ecclesiastical Sites
In the flat, rough pastureland of Derrydonnell More, a circular earthen bank roughly 110 metres across traces the outline of an early ecclesiastical settlement.
Enclosures of this kind, sometimes called cashels or ecclesiastical ringforts depending on their construction, were used by early Irish Christian communities to define sacred space, separating the church, its graveyard, and the lives of those attached to it from the surrounding landscape. What makes this one quietly absorbing is the degree to which it has been absorbed back into that landscape, and yet stubbornly persists.
By the time surveyors examined the site in August 1992, the bank was almost entirely swallowed by thorn and briar at the north-east and north-west, and field-clearance rubble had been piled against it at the north-west. The south-west sector was the exception, preserving a bank some 2.5 metres wide with an internal height of just over a metre, its base still showing inner and outer facing stones that once revetted the earthen core. At the centre of the enclosure stood a church, with a graveyard immediately to its south. Running north-east from the church were traces of a possible radial drystone wall, the kind of internal division sometimes found within early monastic enclosures, though here it had been overlain by a later field wall. Further old field boundaries outside the enclosure to the north and east may represent an associated agricultural system, suggesting the site once organised the working land around it as well as the sacred space within. About 20 metres to the north lies a bullaun stone, a basin-shaped hollow worn or carved into a boulder, objects associated across Ireland with early Christian sites and often with ritual or grinding use. The tower house that stands some 310 metres to the north-north-west is a reminder that this corner of Galway accumulated centuries of occupation, ecclesiastical and secular alike.
A re-inspection in February 2005, prompted by a report of ground works nearby, found that a section of the bank between the south-south-east and south had been removed, and soil had been dumped along the north-east stretch, stripping it of its sod cover. Later aerial imagery showed the western portion of the enclosure had been cleared of overgrowth, making the bank outline considerably more legible in that sector than it had been for years. The site sits in working farmland, and its visibility at any given moment depends as much on the season and recent agricultural activity as on anything the past has left behind.
