Killardry Church (in ruins), Ballydrehid, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
A ruined medieval church with walls still standing up to three metres high, a graveyard that has slowly swallowed its own floor level, and a view of a Norman motte on the horizon: the remains at Killardry in Ballydrehid, County Tipperary, reward close inspection in a way that a casual glance across a pasture field would not suggest.
The ground rises naturally here, and a marshy area lies immediately to the east, giving the site a slightly elevated, quietly isolated quality.
The church is a long building for its type, roughly 20.7 metres east to west internally, constructed in sandstone rubble laid in random courses, a technique common in medieval Irish ecclesiastical building where cut stone was too costly for entire walls but local fieldstone was plentiful. At some point after the original construction, a cross-wall was inserted, probably shortening the usable interior. The east gable survives in the best condition and contains the most architecturally expressive feature on the site: a two-light ogee-headed window, the ogee being a double-curved form associated with later medieval Gothic work, set within a chamfered box surround and capped with a hood-moulding. The hollow spandrels, the shaped spaces between the window lights and the enclosing arch, add a further layer of craft to what might otherwise seem a plain country church. Two opposing doorways survive near the west end of the north and south walls, both round-headed; the southern one is particularly well preserved, with a moulded sandstone surround and the remains of a hood-moulding with a plain label. An aumbry, a small wall recess used to store sacred vessels, survives at the east end of the south wall, and a projecting corbel on the east gable may once have supported a statue. The nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by O'Flanagan and published in 1930, noted additional windows that have since been broken out or collapsed. Ground level inside and outside the church has built up considerably over the centuries, partly through the long use of the surrounding graveyard, where headstones dated 1767 and 1776 have been placed against the inserted cross-wall. From the site, the summit of Knockgraffon motte is visible to the south-east; a motte is an earthen mound raised as the base for a timber or stone tower during the Norman period, and Knockgraffon is one of the more substantial examples in Tipperary, making its presence on the skyline a reminder of the layered medieval history of this stretch of the Suir valley.