Church, Desart Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Desart Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

In a pasture field in County Kilkenny, a medieval church, its graveyard, and a holy well have all vanished so completely that only a faint arc of earthwork hints that anything religious ever stood here.

The site, known from old records as Kilfeachin or Cill Feichín, the church of St Feichin, sits on a slight rise in what locals long called the Church Field, roughly four hundred metres east of where Desart Court once stood. That house, too, is now gone, leaving a landscape in which the absences are almost the whole story.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that while the church and churchyard had already been destroyed by his time, a circular earthen ring enclosing both could still be traced. That enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary typically associated with early medieval monastic foundations in Ireland, points to origins well before the Norman period. The dedication to St Feichin, a saint whose name also attaches to the monastery at Fore in County Westmeath, reinforces that early medieval connection. By the sixteenth century the site had been thoroughly absorbed into the machinery of the Tudor administration. A lease dated 16 April 1574, recorded in the Fiants of Queen Elizabeth, granted Jasper Horsey, Esquire, the tithes of corn and hay, altarages, and other profits of the parish church listed as Lesloynyne alias Tamplefeighane, at a rent of five pounds six shillings and eightpence. The lease itself ran from the termination of an earlier one, dating to 1537, held by the abbot of St Thomas the Martyr in Dublin along with a small group of named individuals including Walter Archer of Kilkenny and Marion Courcey, his wife. It is a curiously precise paper trail for a place that has otherwise left so little on the ground.

Aerial photography taken in July 1968 revealed the outline of a circular enclosure set within a larger one, visible only as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing crops that betrays buried features invisible at ground level. No trace of the church, graveyard, or holy well is apparent on the surface today. The double-enclosure form is consistent with what survives at other early medieval monastic sites across Ireland, where an inner sanctum was separated from an outer zone of activity by concentric boundaries. What was once a named, functioning parish, leased, taxed, and recorded in royal documents, now survives only in a faint shadow pressed into a field.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Church, Desart Demesne, Co. Kilkenny. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement