Site of Church, Kilknockan, Co. Tipperary

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Site of Church, Kilknockan, Co. Tipperary

At the base of Kilknockan Hill in County Tipperary, a medieval church has been sinking quietly into the pasture for a very long time.

Most of its walls now rise only a few centimetres above the grass, broad limestone rubble reduced to low ridges in the field. Only the west gable still stands to any real height, somewhere between four and five metres of roughly coursed stone, heavily draped in ivy and shedding tumbled blocks at its base. Beside the church, in the fields stretching to the south, west, and north, earthworks mark what was once a wider settlement, and around fifty metres to the west-northwest there was formerly a castle, though nothing of it remains visible above ground.

When Ordnance Survey investigators visited in 1840, the church was already in much the same ruinous condition it presents today, but the west gable was apparently more legible. Their letters, published later by O'Flanagan, record two windows in the gable with some precision: a lower opening, nine feet from the ground on the exterior, rectangular and narrow, built with chiselled and bevelled limestone; and above it a second, broader but shallower window, its stones only roughly dressed, positioned in a way that suggests it once lit a floor or loft space within. Both openings are now hidden beneath the ivy. Gaps in the north and south walls, roughly three metres from the gable, may be the positions of original doorways. At the east end of the church, a low raised area could represent either collapsed debris or the remnant of a small chancel, a separate liturgical space that was a common feature of medieval Irish churches.

The site was associated with a graveyard that appeared on both the first-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 and the revised edition of 1903 to 1904, shown by a dashed line to the south and southwest of the church and labelled first as the "Site of Grave Yard" and later as "Grave Yard (Disused)". The dashed boundary, rather than a solid line, suggests the graveyard was never formally enclosed. Today there is no visible trace of it: no marker stones, no headstones, nothing at the surface to indicate where it lay.

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