Church, Kiltormer, Co. Galway

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Church, Kiltormer, Co. Galway

On the eastern edge of Kiltormer village in County Galway, there is a graveyard where a church once stood, and then did not, and has left almost nothing behind to mark the difference.

No walls, no nave, no doorway. The building has been so thoroughly erased that even its foundations, once the only thing still discernible, are no longer visible at the surface.

The church in question was the old Protestant parish church of Kiltormer. When the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in the nineteenth century, the account recorded by O'Flanagan noted that the building had been in use until relatively recently, when it was, in the plain language of the record, "thrown down." By the time that observation was written, only the foundation lines could be made out. Now even those are gone. What remains is a graveyard, and within it, in the southeastern corner, a possible finial cross, which is a decorative stone element typically placed at the apex or terminal point of a gabled roof or wall, that may once have belonged to the vanished building. Around fifty-five metres to the east lies a holy well, a separate site entirely, though its proximity to the churchyard places it within a cluster of features that together suggest a landscape with a long devotional presence, one that has quietly shed most of its visible evidence.

The graveyard itself survives, and the possible finial cross is worth looking for in the southeast of the site, though it is easy to overlook without knowing what you are searching for.

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Pete F
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