Modeshil Church (in ruins), Modeshil, Co. Tipperary

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Modeshil Church (in ruins), Modeshil, Co. Tipperary

The most telling detail at Modeshil is a headstone.

The Cody stone, dated 1770, sits inside the church walls rather than outside them, which means that by the mid-eighteenth century the building had already lost its roof and people were burying their dead within what had become an open enclosure. A church that becomes a graveyard for its own congregation, without anyone apparently marking the transition, is a quietly unsettling thing.

The ruin itself sits on a low rise in pasture in County Tipperary, a rectangular structure built of roughly coursed limestone rubble, measuring about 27 metres east to west and just over six metres wide. The walls survive to around 2.7 metres for much of their length, though the west gable is the most impressive element, still standing to roughly ten metres and capped by a bellcote that once held two bell openings; only the northern one remains. The south wall retains a round-headed doorway with chamfered external stonework and diagonal stops, and crucially a draw-bar hole on the interior, the slot into which a heavy timber bar would have slid to secure the door from within. The east window, a two-light glazed opening with an external chamfer, has lost its head entirely; the fallen apex of the east gable now lies in a heap beneath the sill. A second doorway in the north wall, noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1930 as having been sixteen feet from the west gable, has since been crudely filled with masonry and is now further obscured by ivy that coats almost every surface, inside and out. Just twenty-five metres to the west stands a tower house, the fortified residential structure typical of late medieval Gaelic and Anglo-Norman landowners, making clear that the church once formed part of a more substantial local settlement. Against the north side of the church, slightly off-centre to the east, a low sod-covered rectangular enclosure with a sunken interior is said by local tradition to be a famine burial plot, a use that would place it in the 1840s, nearly a century after the church had already fallen silent.

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