Church, Kilduffahoo, Co. Limerick
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Churches & Chapels
The graveyard surrounding the ruins at Kilduffahoo is not an ordinary parish burial ground.
For generations it served primarily as a resting place for children, one of many such sites across Ireland known informally as cillíní, places set apart from consecrated ground where unbaptised infants and others considered outside the full rites of the Church were quietly buried. That particular use gives the site a subdued, melancholy atmosphere that its overgrown condition only deepens.
The ruins themselves are those of a medieval church associated with Dubh Dhá Thuath, the place name preserved in the Irish form of the townland, Cill Dubh Dhá Thuath. When the Ordnance Survey passed through in 1840 and recorded their observations in the notebooks for Doon parish, they described what they saw as the remains of a friary church, roughly 60 feet long and 24 feet wide, with portions of the walls still standing about 4 feet high. The small burial ground attached to it, they noted, sat on a slight rise of around 20 metres in diameter and was used chiefly for the interments of children. Nearly two centuries later, the southern half of the east gable still stands, and the lower courses of the north and south walls remain visible, along with wall footings of the west gable. Whether the original structure truly belonged to a friary in the formal sense, meaning a house of mendicant friars such as Franciscans or Dominicans, or whether the Ordnance Survey surveyors were working loosely with the term, cannot be determined from what survives above ground.
The site lies immediately east of a public road and south of a deserted farmyard, on a south-facing slope in rolling pasture. Access is straightforward enough in terms of proximity, but the ruins themselves sit within a woodland area heavily covered in scrub and ivy, which makes close examination of the stonework difficult in practice. The graveyard lies immediately south of the church remains. Visitors with an interest in early ecclesiastical sites or in the history of children's burial practices in rural Ireland will find the location quietly affecting, though they should expect to see little architectural detail given the vegetation. The site is most legible in late autumn or winter, when the leaf cover is thinnest.