Church, Woodsgift, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
In County Kilkenny, a small rectangle of foundations once marked a chapel that was later converted into a stable and is now gone entirely, swallowed first by a grove of larch trees and then by mid-twentieth-century land clearance.
By 1905, the writer William Carrigan could report that nothing remained of the building except bare foundations measuring roughly 12.8 metres by 6 metres, enclosed within a low earthen fence and still known locally as "the chapel yard". Even then, it had left no trace on any map.
The chapel was a penal chapel, a term referring to the informal places of Catholic worship built and used during the Penal Laws era, when Catholic religious practice was legally restricted and permanent church buildings were not permitted. According to Carrigan, it was built by a Lieutenant Wood of Woodsgift, about 500 yards north of his own house. On Wood's death, the building was repurposed as a stable, a fate that was not uncommon for such structures. Writing somewhat earlier, in the 1870s, John Healy described the site differently: an oval mound roughly 119 metres long, densely planted with tall larch, with the foundation of an old ruin still traceable at its centre. The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1839, and its 1900 revision, show a D-shaped enclosure at a location approximately 250 metres west-southwest of Woodsgift House, which appears to correspond to the plantation surrounding the chapel and its yard. When the site was visited in 1955, observers found only a bank encircling a grove of trees. Shortly afterwards, the feature was levelled as part of a Land Project scheme, and today neither the enclosure nor any trace of the building survives at ground level.