Church, Jigginstown, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Jigginstown, Co. Kildare

By 1782, cartographers were already recording this small Kildare church as a ruin. Taylor's map of that year marks it as 'Temple Carragh (in ruins)', and the structure today has continued its long, slow return to the ground. What remains at the north end of a low pasture ridge is a rectangular shell of randomly coursed limestone blocks and flags, its walls reduced almost to field-boundary height, the tallest surviving section reaching no more than 1.6 metres. A single chamfered quoin, a dressed corner stone cut at an angle to deflect water and weather, is still visible at the external south-east angle, one of the few details that hints at any deliberate craftsmanship in what was once a functioning building.

The church appears under the name 'Templecarragh' on Noble and Keenan's earlier 1752 map of County Kildare, suggesting it was already a familiar local landmark even before it was ruinous enough to warrant a parenthetical note from Taylor's surveyors. The interior measured roughly 8.3 metres east to west and 4.1 metres wide, with walls averaging about a metre thick. A rubble-filled gap near the centre of the north wall is thought to mark the site of the original doorway, and gaps in the east gable and south wall preserve the approximate positions of windows that no longer survive. To the east of the building, a grass-covered raised area, defined by a low scarp and extending some 7.4 metres from the gable, suggests an associated structure of some kind, though it does not appear to have been a chancel. The question of what it was remains open. Writing in 1905, Fitzgerald recorded the discovery of human bones at the site, which raises the possibility that a graveyard once occupied the ground here, though no visible burial markers have been noted.

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