Ecclesiastical enclosure, Killaloonty, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ecclesiastical Sites
In a flat stretch of Co. Galway pastureland, where the ground softens westward into bogland, there survives the faint outline of an early ecclesiastical enclosure.
It is not the kind of site that announces itself. What remains at Killaloonty is largely a matter of subtle earthworks, the sort of thing that rewards careful looking rather than a casual glance across the field.
The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring about 65 metres across, and was originally defined by at least two concentric boundaries: an inner raised bank, a fosse between them, and possibly an outer bank beyond that. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch or trench dug as part of a defensive or boundary arrangement. At Killaloonty the fosse is wide and flat-bottomed and is the best-preserved element of the whole ensemble, surviving from the eastern side around through south to north-north-west. The inner bank, by contrast, stands only around 0.3 metres high and is legible only in fragments at the south-east, west, and north-west. In the south-eastern quadrant of the interior sits a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish as a cillín, traditionally used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Within that burial ground, two short runs of parallel wall foundations, each no more than 2.6 metres long and oriented on a north-west to south-east axis, suggest the ghost of an earlier structure, possibly the remains of a small chapel or oratory, though too little survives to say with any certainty what it once was.
The enclosure itself belongs to a pattern well recognised across early medieval Ireland, where ecclesiastical sites were marked out by one or more concentric earthen boundaries, often reusing or adapting earlier forms. At Killaloonty those boundaries have been softened almost to nothing by centuries of agricultural use, leaving a site that is more legible on paper than on the ground, but no less interesting for that.