Church, Kilsharvan, Co. Meath

Both the north and south nave doorways carry these marks, quiet evidence of a practical habit that sat alongside the devotional life of the building for however long the parish used it.

The church sits at the southern edge of a small plateau above the valley of the River Nanny, dedicated to St. John the Baptist and already appearing in the ecclesiastical taxation of Pope Nicholas IV between 1302 and 1306, where it is listed under the name Kilkernan. By 1622, the archbishop James Ussher was noting that the church of Kilkervan was only indifferently repaired and the chancel already ruined. It never recovered. Both Anthony Dopping's visitation of 1682 to 1685 and the Royal Visitation of 1693 record that the parish church had lain in ruins since 1641, unfenced and unattended. What survives today is nonetheless surprisingly substantial: the nave and chancel walls stand almost complete, lacking only the west wall and the chancel arch. The chancel arch piers preserve beam-holes on their inner faces, the telltale sign of a rood screen, the wooden partition that once separated nave from chancel in medieval parish churches. A small sacristy added to the north of the chancel retains a slender limestone window with a cusped ogee head, the distinctive flowing pointed curve of late medieval Gothic stonework. One window in the chancel's south wall also survives with a double cusped ogee head and roundels over the lights, while the rest of the chancel glazing has long since gone. The graveyard enclosing the church is defined by masonry walls on all four sides, raised in places with later brick courses, though the northern wall was left unheightened because an old section of the road between Julianstown and Duleek runs along it.