Religious house, Addergoole, Co. Laois

What survives is something stranger than masonry: a persistent local tradition, and the habit of the soil itself. According to the early twentieth-century historian William Carrigan, whenever the so-called Kiln Field near Belmont House was ploughed or brought under cultivation, the outline of the associated churchyard would reassert itself, ghosting up through the disturbed earth to betray where it had been. The road to Aghmacart, he noted, runs directly through what was once the ancient cemetery.

The convent's origins lie in a grant made around 1240 by David FitzMilo, Baron of Overke, who assigned the townland of Addergoole, then known as Gortaddrigoole, along with other lands, churches, and chapels, to the prioress and nuns of Kilculliheen, a house situated at Ferrybank. There is no record that the Addergoole site was ever actually occupied as a functioning convent after that grant was made, yet the connection persisted in a practical sense. In 1540, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Abbess of Kilculliheen was recorded surrendering, among other properties, a messuage with ten acres of arable land, pasture and meadow at Addergoole, valued at five shillings annually. A year later, in 1541, the nuns were still registered as holding sixty acres there. The site Carrigan located places the nunnery about four perches, roughly twenty metres, north-west of the lodge-gate of Belmont House, low-lying ground beside the Aghmacart road. Its foundations, he wrote, had already been uprooted for well over a century by the time he was recording local memory of it in the early 1900s, and the structure itself was destroyed sometime before 1805.