What is recorded here

Enclosure in Cill Éinne stands beside Teampall Bheanáin in County Galway, where a long drystone terrace and fragmentary wall may have formed a double rectangle around the church. Built on bare limestone and repaired in places, it would have blocked the prevailing wind and given the sacred ground a defined edge. The stones still mark the line between the built place and the falling ground, preserving the shape of shelter long after the hands that made it disappeared.

Teampall Bheanáin (GA119-009001-) was built on the E edge of a bare flat limestone fissured terrace and the ground falls away unevenly to the E of it. The ‘traces of a cashel’ recorded by Westropp (1895, 266) near the church may be the drystone terrace (L 12.5m) with square corners that was built up against the slope about 7m to the E of it. Its lower courses are well built; the upper part has been repaired. It varies in height from 1.4m at the NE corner to 0.6m at the SE corner. The corner of a second terrace or wall was noted to the W of the N face of this terrace and its SE corner was uncovered during the course of excavations, which revealed the foundations of a wall (Wth 0.8m), built on solid rock, running E-W from this corner. No trace survived further to the W where the bedrock was fully exposed (Manning 1985, 101). It is possible that these terrace features are the downslope elements of double rectangular enclosure around the E, S and W sides of the church. If originally built to a reasonable height it would have provided shelter from the prevailing winds (ibid., 110). Compiled by: Olive Alcock Date of upload: 4 February 2016

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