Enclosure

The National Monuments Service's description

Located on the shoreline on the SE side of Inishmurray island, 85m SE of an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure (SL001-001001-).
A well-made wall of mortared random rubble encloses the church (SL001-002001-), cemetery (SL001-002007-) and leacht (SL001-003001-) at Templenaman. The wall is 0.8 m wide and, variously, 0.9–1.3 m high. It is capped by a coping of roughly squared flat slabs. The enclosure thus formed is oblong on plan – 40 m long by 15 m wide – rounded in the north, but truncated in the south by cliff erosion (a low rubble wall of secondary build spans part of the cliff-edge, but even this is partly eroded). Thus, the enclosure was certainly longer once, but is receding before marine erosion at its south end. There is a gateway on the west side, with a large flat orthostat forming one jamb (SL001-002011-), and a rough stile at either side of the enclosure towards the south end. The wall appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey (1837) more or less as on later editions; despite this, it is probably of relatively modern construction.
This is a National Monument (no. 117) in state ownership.

The above description is derived from the results of a survey of the archaeological monuments on Inishmurray undertaken in 1997-1999 and published in:

Jerry O’Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin 2008 Inishmurrary. Monks and pilgrims in an Atlantic landscape. Volume 1: Archaeological Survey and Excavations 1997-2000. Cork. The Collins Press.

Date of upload: 16 January 2018