Rathcoole Church (in ruins), Carrigeen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
A small ruined church dedicated to St. Thomas the Apostle sits on the crest of a low hill in County Kilkenny, set within a graveyard and raised slightly above the surrounding pasture on a flat platform, so that the ground falls away steeply on the western side.
It is an unprepossessing fragment in many ways, yet what survives has a quiet precision about it: well-coursed stonework, corner stones that are roughly hammer dressed rather than finely finished, and a single ivy-covered window in the west gable that has managed to hold its shape through the centuries.
The church measured roughly 6.6 metres north to south and 17.8 metres east to west, a modest but not tiny structure. Today the west gable stands nearly to its original apex, and a nine-metre stretch of the northern wall reaches to about 1.75 metres in height, its thickness measuring 0.74 metres. The rest of the building survives only as footings, low outlines in the grass that trace the plan of what once stood. The window in the west gable is flat-headed and chamfered, meaning its edges are cut at a slight angle rather than squared off sharply, a detail noted by the local historian William Carrigan in the third volume of his 1905 history of the diocese of Ossory. Carrigan also recorded that the patron saint of the church was Thomas the Apostle, the disciple whose association with doubt and then affirmation gave him a particular resonance in medieval devotional life.
The hill commands clear views in every direction across what is now largely reclaimed grassland, the kind of open agricultural landscape that replaced earlier, rougher ground over successive generations of drainage and improvement. The elevated position would have made the church a landmark across the surrounding countryside, even in its working life, and the low platform on which it sits gives the ruin a slight formality, as though the ground itself was shaped to receive it.