Church in Ruins, Oldconnell, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
A baptismal font that once stood inside a church now sits in front of a private house next door, while the church itself has been reduced to little more than lines in the grass. That quiet displacement tells you most of what there is to know about the old ecclesiastical site at Oldconnell in County Kildare, where the building has effectively dissolved back into the ground it stood on.
By 1993, all that remained visible above ground were foundation walls, heavily overgrown, tracing the outline of a structure whose age and dedication are no longer easily determined. A font, the stone basin used for baptisms, which would originally have occupied a significant position within the church interior, had been removed at some point and repositioned outside Oldconnell House, the property immediately to the east. Whether it was moved for safekeeping or simply convenience is not recorded. It now sits as a kind of inadvertent monument to the church it came from, separated from its original context but still tangible in a way the building itself is not. The graveyard around the site continues to exist alongside these remains, as is common with early church sites in Ireland, where the burial ground often outlasts the structure it once served by several centuries.