Church, Kilmaloge, Co. Tipperary

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Church, Kilmaloge, Co. Tipperary

In a tillage field between a rural road and a railway line in County Tipperary, a church may or may not exist.

That uncertainty is the whole point. Local people know the area as a children's burial ground, the kind of informal unconsecrated ground, sometimes called a cillín, where unbaptised infants were quietly interred for centuries, often on the margins of older sacred sites. Yet there is no local tradition of a church here at all, which makes the place an odd kind of puzzle: a possible ecclesiastical ruin that the community living closest to it does not remember as one.

The site was tracked down with considerable effort by a researcher named Power in 1908, who described its location with the precision of someone who had looked hard and was not entirely sure he had found the right spot. His directions place it roughly 200 metres east of Kilmaloge pond, on the north side of a railway line, with a road forming its northern boundary running east towards Nicholastown Castle. What survives, if anything does, appears to be concentrated in the north-east corner of the field that sits between that road and the railway. There, an unusual arrangement of stone walls forms a field boundary that may incorporate the last remaining fragment of an earlier stone building. The eastern boundary is rubble-built and has been partially levelled over time to allow movement between fields, which means whatever structural logic once organised this corner of the landscape has been further obscured. To the north, the Loughlohery tower house sits visible on the hill, a reminder that this quietly agricultural stretch of Tipperary was once considerably more animated with settlement and use.

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