Church, Clonmeen, Co. Laois

That quiet contradiction is perhaps the most striking thing about this site on a low ridge in County Laois, where a modest medieval church once stood about two hundred metres south of a now largely vanished abbey. Today, almost nothing of the building survives above ground, save for a single rubble limestone wall running east to west, roughly ten metres long. Farm buildings press in from the east, and the ridge gives little away.

When the ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan recorded the site in 1905, considerably more was still legible. Writing in his history of the Diocese of Ossory, he described a church measuring roughly thirty-nine feet in length and just over twenty-five feet in width, with unusually thick walls, the east gable reaching forty-three inches across. A doorway in the south wall, placed thirteen feet from the west gable, had foundation stones still in position, though the opening itself was narrow, only thirty inches wide. More intriguing was a small credence set into the south wall near the east end, a credence being a shallow niche used to hold the vessels and elements for the Mass. This one was crudely made, its arch formed by two flat stones leaning together at the top to create a simple pointed form. Even then, the structure was in poor condition: the south wall was reasonably preserved, the east gable had collapsed to within a yard of the ground, the west gable had all but disappeared, and the north wall survived only in fragments. Carrigan's observation about the graveyard remains unexplained; the surrounding ground bore clear evidence of a substantial burial area, yet the church interior and its immediate exterior showed none.