Site of Kilfeakle Church, Kilfeakle Churchquarter, Co. Tipperary

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Site of Kilfeakle Church, Kilfeakle Churchquarter, Co. Tipperary

What survives of the church at Kilfeakle is, on the face of it, not much: a single stretch of north wall, still standing to over two metres, and grass-covered traces where the east wall and the western return once ran.

Yet the place carries a quiet complexity, because this is not the oldest church associated with the name Kilfeakle. A second, earlier site lies roughly a kilometre to the north-west, which means that what looks like a solitary ruin is in fact the later of two places of worship sharing the same dedication, each now reduced to fragments in the landscape.

The surviving north wall, around six and a half metres long and three quarters of a metre thick, is built of limestone rubble laid in rough courses and bonded with a medium-course mortar. Some of the cut, punched, and dressed stonework from the church has been reused in the modern graveyard wall that surrounds the site, a common fate for dressed stone once a building fell out of use. By the time the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1840, the church was already recorded as a rectangular ruin, its footprint measuring roughly fourteen and a half metres east to west and eight and a half metres north to south, set within a sub-rectangular graveyard. The earliest legible headstone inside the ruined shell dates to 1730, giving some sense of when the surrounding community was still actively burying its dead here, even as the building itself declined. The church sits on a level plateau on the northern side of the graveyard, in the village of Kilfeakle, Co. Tipperary.

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