Church, Blackhall, Co. Kildare

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Blackhall, Co. Kildare

At the highest point of a graveyard in County Kildare, a set of grass-covered foundations marks the site of a church that has almost entirely returned to the earth. The outline is still legible, a shallow rectangular depression with the faint ridges of walls just visible beneath the turf, but what survives above ground amounts to little more than the memory of a building. The nave has been dug out to a depth of around 1.4 metres, and a gap roughly 1.2 metres wide near the western end of the north wall is thought to indicate where the original entrance once stood. The chancel, the smaller eastern portion of the church reserved for the clergy, is considerably more modest in scale than the nave, measuring only about 3 metres by 2 metres.

The church carried the name Kylsenlocan, a form that does not appear in any current townland or parish designation, which gives it the particular quality of a place that has slipped out of everyday knowledge. The clearest surviving reference to it comes from a 1640 will. Roland Eustace of Blackhall, writing on 27th January of that year, expressed his wish to be buried in the chapel of Kylsenlocan, a detail recorded by Fitzgerald in 1907. The Eustaces were a prominent Anglo-Norman family with deep roots in Kildare, and the fact that Roland identified this particular chapel as his desired resting place suggests it held some significance to his family, even at a date when the building may already have been in decline. The site sits within a graveyard, meaning it continued to serve the dead long after the church structure itself ceased to function.

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