Site of Church, Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary

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Site of Church, Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary

A graveyard on a west-facing Tipperary hillside holds a church that has effectively vanished twice.

The medieval building that once stood here was already a ruin by the late fifteenth century, and a Church of Ireland structure that later rose on or near the same spot has since disappeared without trace. What remains is a slight rise of ground at the centre of the burial ground, which may be all that survives of the levelled medieval fabric beneath.

The story of the earlier church's decline has a specific, documented cause. In 1478, the priory of St Catherine the Virgin in Waterford was charged with leasing the rectory of Ballingarry to what the record calls "diverse laymen", a practice that stripped the parish of its clergy and the income needed to maintain the building. The consequence was stark: the church fell into ruins and the parishioners were left without access to divine worship. By 1640, according to the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, the glebeland, meaning the land attached to the parish church and used to support its minister, amounted to two acres on the east side of the church, enclosed by a ditch. A nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building was subsequently erected here, possibly on the medieval footprint, as noted by the scholar John O'Donovan in his Ordnance Survey letters. That structure too is now gone. The graveyard that surrounds the site contains memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a castle survives some 160 metres to the north-west, a reminder that this upland ground once held a modest concentration of ecclesiastical and defensive settlement. A modern bungalow now occupies the adjoining field to the east.

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