Kilmore Church (in Ruins), Kilmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ecclesiastical Sites
A ruined church sitting in the western quarter of a nearly circular earthen enclosure is unusual enough, but what gives this site in County Tipperary its particular character is the enclosure itself, which most passing walkers would probably not register as anything at all.
The bank that defines it has been worn down almost to a scarp in most places, its internal height barely reaching twenty centimetres in some stretches. Only on the upslope arc, running from the south-west around through the west to the north, does it survive with any real presence, rising to just under a metre on the exterior face. A partial fosse, the shallow ditch that once ran outside the bank, is still faintly traceable on that same upslope side. No original entrance can be identified. The whole enclosure measures roughly 94 metres north to south and 88 metres on a north-east to south-west axis, making it a substantial space, even if the ground now gives little away.
According to the scholars Aubrey Gwynn and R. Neville Hadcock, whose survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland remains a standard reference, this was the site of a monastery recorded under the name Kill-mor-aradhthire. The first element of that name, "kill" or "cill", is the Irish word for a church or monastic cell, and its presence in placenames across Ireland generally signals an early ecclesiastical foundation. The modern townland name, Kilmore, preserves a version of the same root. A field boundary, already present when the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were produced in the nineteenth century, cuts across the enclosure on a south-west to north-east line, dividing a space that was once, in some form, unified. The church remains sit on gently sloping ground just below the crest of the hill, with open views to the south and east, the kind of position that early monastic communities often favoured for reasons that mixed the practical with the symbolic.