Church, Ballingaddy North, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Churches & Chapels
What survives of this medieval parish church in County Limerick is fragmentary enough to be easily overlooked, yet the fragments that remain carry a surprisingly well-documented past.
The west gable and the side walls of the nave were still standing when the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in the early twentieth century, though by that point the windows and doorways on both the south and north faces had already been defaced, a process that was complete before 1840. One feature worth noting is an oblong opening in the gable walls, measuring roughly three metres tall by just over one metre wide, described as being of regular masonry, suggesting some care was taken in its construction.
The church was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a dedication formally noted in 1410, and the building comprised a nave and choir, the larger section measuring approximately twelve metres by seven, with a smaller adjoining space of around eight point eight by five point three metres. The site appears in records as early as 1291 to 1302 under the name Balygady. A John le Troy held the living in 1378. In 1394, a more complicated episode appears in the papal registers: Pope Boniface IX had ordered that a priest named Richard Bondwill be granted a canonry and the perpetual vicarage of Ballagady, valued at ten marks, but the grant was declared void and the position transferred instead to a Thomas de S. Jacobo, as recorded in the Calendar of Papal Letters.
The site sits in Ballingaddy North, a quiet rural townland in County Limerick. Visitors approaching the ruin should expect the kind of access typical of medieval church remains in this part of Ireland, which often means crossing farmland or following a field boundary. The measured dimensions Westropp recorded give a reasonable sense of the original scale, so even with partial walls remaining, it is possible to trace the outline of the building on the ground. The defaced openings are worth examining closely, as the stonework around them may still show evidence of their original form despite the damage sustained in the centuries before the first Ordnance Survey observations were made.