County: Sligo Site name: TRAHAUN O RIAIN, Inishmurray
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 97E0256
Author: Jerry O’Sullivan, GUARD, Archaeology Department, University of Glasgow
Site type: Altar and Cross-slab
Period/Dating: Medieval (AD 400-AD 1600)
ITM: E 556745m, N 854070m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.433335, -8.666672
Total excavation of Trahaun O Riain was conducted by GUARD in August 1997. The work was commissioned by the National Monuments and Historic Properties Service in response to advancing coastal erosion. The monument is one of several outdoor altars associated with a 6th-century monastic settlement near the centre of the island.
In its primary phase, the monument appears to have consisted of a small stone cell and—immediately before it—a small area of paving which supported an upright timber (possibly the post for a portable altar or mensal tablet). In the second phase this paving was sealed by an upstanding altar. This was built of drystone rubble, roughly coursed, forming a regular, ‘square’ cairn, 0.7m high and 1.9m in maximum length. The altar itself was enclosed by a low drystone rubble wall. This abutted the walls of the adjacent cell and was clearly of a secondary build. A small cairn lay a few metres from the enclosing wall on the south side. Fragments of a small green glass vessel—possibly of Mediterranean origin—were found within the base of the wall core. A cross-inscribed slab was found in the rebuilt entrance to the cell. This work probably represents maintenance or rebuilding of the monument in the modern period. No human skeletal remains or occupation material were found.
An important interpretation which can be derived from this excavation is that the altar is not a later medieval monument, as some have proposed, but is an element in the early monastic community’s conception of the entire island as a liturgical landscape, in which the central monastic settlement and its main churches were amplified by a series of outlying monuments on the island’s periphery.
Reconstruction of the monument on an adjacent site—at an appropriate distance from the eroding cliff edge—was completed by the National Monuments and Historic Properties Service in September 1997. The cross-inscribed slab from the site, along with others from the island, is now on display at the island’s former primary school, which has recently been renovated for this purpose.
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