Church, Boolymore, Co. Cork

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Church, Boolymore, Co. Cork

In a field near Boolymore House in north Cork, a medieval church has effectively ceased to exist, at least above ground.

By 1934, when a researcher named Bowman recorded the site, it was already reduced to grass-covered mounds measuring just 26 feet by 19 feet, with no visible graves remaining. Today, even those mounds are gone, and the only surviving evidence that anything was ever here is the name attached to two neighbouring fields, Upper Killeen and Lower Killeen, lying about 400 metres south of Boolymore House.

The word killeen, from the Irish cillín, typically refers to a small unconsecrated burial ground, often used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from formal church burial. Its appearance as a field name here suggests that local memory of the site's function persisted long after the physical remains had vanished. Bowman's 1934 account places the church in land then belonging to a John Bourke, and notes that the footprint, modest even by the standards of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture, was still faintly legible in the landscape at that point. The double field name, upper and lower, implies the site may have been more extensive than the surviving mound suggested, or at least that it occupied local memory across a wider area than the church itself.

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