Building, Kilshenane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
In a field in County Tipperary, all that remains of a substantial building is a set of grass-covered wall-footings, their rectangular outline still legible beneath the turf on a south-east-facing slope.
The interior dimensions, roughly eleven metres along its south-west to north-east axis and eight metres across, suggest a structure of some consequence, though nothing above ground survives to indicate what it once was.
The surrounding landscape quietly hints at a possible answer. The local landowner knows this field simply as the Church Field, a name that points, however tentatively, toward ecclesiastical use. Around 240 metres to the south, in an adjoining field, sits Killeen Well, marked by that name on the 1903 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. A killeen, in Irish tradition, was typically a small, unconsecrated burial ground, often associated with unbaptised infants or with early Christian sites, and the pairing of such a name with a well frequently signals pre-Reformation or early medieval religious activity. Eighty-eight metres to the south-east lies a separate enclosure, and the surrounding grassland holds a scattering of low earthworks, some of which align with old field boundaries already visible on the first edition Ordnance Survey maps of 1840. Taken together, the pattern suggests a settlement or sacred site of some antiquity, its original function worn smooth by centuries of agricultural use.