Church, Kilnamona, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Churches & Chapels
What remains of this medieval parish church in County Clare is, in some ways, more interesting for what is missing than what survives.
The north wall is gone entirely, the west wall reduced to its footing, and only the base of the south wall still stands to any meaningful height. Yet the east gable rises intact, preserving a slender ogee-headed window, a form characterised by its double curve rising to a pointed apex, complete with a square hood moulding and one decorated label stop. It is a precise, almost delicate piece of stonework set against a ruin that is otherwise largely skeletal.
The church sits on a steep south-facing slope overlooking an east-west valley, and its origins are old enough to appear in the Ecclesiastical Taxation of 1302, where the parish is listed as Kylnemua. The rectangular limestone structure measures roughly 21.6 metres east to west and just under 10 metres north to south. A doorway near the western end of the south wall was described as pointed by the antiquarian T.J. Westropp in the early 1900s, and it once held a stoup, a small stone basin for holy water at a church entrance, though the dressed stones around it are now missing. A round-headed window survives towards the eastern end of the same wall, set within a lintelled embrasure. The church sits inside a subrectangular graveyard bounded by a masonry wall, and a small socket in the ground once held a standing cross. Just to the south-east of the graveyard is Toberlaughteen, a circular holy well barely a metre across, roofed with a corbelled stone canopy and dedicated to St. Laughteen. Holy wells of this type were focal points for pattern days, annual gatherings of prayer and communal ritual tied to a saint's feast. This one was venerated on the 19th of March, though no trace of that practice continues today. A second well, Tobernatasha, lies roughly 150 metres further south, hinting at a landscape that was once densely layered with devotional significance.