Church, Clintstown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
In County Kilkenny, at the precise point where two townlands and a river converge, there is said to be an early church and graveyard that no longer shows any trace of itself above the ground.
The site is known only through local tradition and the work of later historians, its presence inferred rather than observed. Even the field in which it may lie carries a name that gestures towards something older and more substantial: the Castle field, a designation that in Irish rural usage often marks ground where the memory of a structure outlasts the structure itself.
The earliest written record comes from William Carrigan's 1905 history of the Diocese of Ossory, which places the church and its associated graveyard in the angle formed by Clintstown townland where it meets Brackin and the River Nore. The Nore is the one fixed reference point in the landscape; Ordnance Survey mapping of the area shows no other watercourse nearby. A later local account by O'Kelly, writing in 1985, adds the detail about the Castle field, suggesting that oral knowledge of the site's approximate location persisted into the late twentieth century even as any physical evidence had long since disappeared. Whether the church was early medieval in origin, or belongs to some later period, the surviving record does not say.