Church, Caherass, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Churches & Chapels
A medieval chapel that closed not because of neglect or reformation, but because its own chaplain died by suicide within its walls, carries a particular kind of weight.
The ruins known as the Chapel of Say, on the north bank of the River Maigue in County Limerick, were abandoned after that act was deemed to have desecrated the building beyond continued use. The ivied, overgrown walls that remain today overlook a fording point and a fishing weir on the Maigue, details that hint at how central this small spot once was to the life of the surrounding land.
The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, pieced together a documentary trail for the site stretching back to the mid-thirteenth century. Around 1251, a man named John Flandrens made a quit claim, a formal legal relinquishment of rights, to lands including Caherass, and by 1256 Bishop Robert had leased the site along with its fishery. The chapel appears in records under a shifting series of names: Chapel of Say, alias Cathiorassa in 1410; Cap. Say, in the rectory of Croom, in 1418; Carassie in 1601; and Capella Say in 1615. Westropp also noted a competing identification, with the scholar Reeves associating the site with a place called Dunkepchy. Writing in 1826, Fitzgerald recorded that the chapel had functioned as a chapel of ease, a secondary place of worship built to serve parishioners living at a distance from the main parish church, and that it belonged to the Carbery family, on whose land it stood.
The ruins sit within the demesne lands of Caherass Court, which lies roughly 300 metres to the west. A mill race runs to the south, and the remains of an old mill stand about 435 metres to the north-east, so the immediate landscape retains several layers of its former working life. The walls are described as thickly overgrown with ivy, which both softens and obscures the fabric of the building. Visitors should expect an untended, atmospheric site rather than a managed one, and the proximity to the river means the ground can be soft underfoot.