Neddans church (in ruins), Neddans, Co. Tipperary

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Neddans church (in ruins), Neddans, Co. Tipperary

A ruined church on a west-facing slope in County Tipperary holds a quiet architectural puzzle within its walls: the east gable, which appears to be a later addition, is not the original end of the building at all.

The structure was once longer, and when the original east wall was destroyed entirely, a new one was built in its place, not to restore the church to worship, but, as the Ordnance Survey Letters record it, 'to shut up the Church for a burial place'. That repurposing, documented by O'Flanagan in 1930, left behind a building shortened by necessity rather than design, its proportions quietly altered by the priorities of the living making space for the dead.

The church stands in the north-west quadrant of a roughly rectangular graveyard, roughly 17.5 metres east to west and built from coursed limestone with occasional sandstone boulders worked into the fabric. The walls still stand to around 3.5 metres in places and are about a metre thick, giving some sense of the solidity the original structure once had. What is particularly unusual is the arrangement of opposing round-headed doorways in the north and south walls, a feature that gives the ruin a degree of architectural formality. The south doorway, with its tall embrasure, has been repaired at some point, while the north doorway has been blocked up entirely. The west gable, nearly eight metres high and almost ten metres wide, is now heavily draped in ivy, though a small opening survives at attic level, possibly the remnant of a central light window. The River Suir runs roughly 200 metres to the west, just below the slope on which the building sits.

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