Church, Burncourt, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
On a north-east-facing slope near Burncourt, on a ridge above an eastward-looking valley, an early religious site has effectively ceased to exist.
Not abandoned, not overgrown, but quarried away. The greater portion of the church site was destroyed in the process of cutting limestone to feed a nearby kiln, a lime kiln being a simple industrial structure used to burn limestone into quicklime for agricultural and building use. Nothing is visible at ground level today.
The record of what was lost comes largely from Patrick Power, who wrote in 1908 that the site of the early religious establishment lay due north of the then-present church, at a distance of about two fields. By that point the quarrying had already done its damage. The limekiln and quarry that consumed the site were prominent enough to appear on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed around 1904 to 1905, and the disused quarry remains visible today. The precise boundaries of the original church enclosure are unknown, and any location given for the site should be treated as approximate, pointing only to the general area Power described rather than to a confirmed spot on the ground.
What makes this place quietly arresting is not what survives but the particular way it vanished. Industrial and agricultural demands quietly dismantled an early medieval ecclesiastical site, and the process was so thorough that it registered on an Ordnance Survey map not as a church ruin but as a quarry and kiln. The site exists now mainly as an absence, documented in a century-old footnote.