Church, Kildanoge, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Kildanoge, Co. Tipperary

In the forestry on a steep north-west-facing slope in County Tipperary, there is a place that may or may not be a church.

Two sandstone blocks sit roughly aligned east to west, nine metres apart. Nearby, small piles of moss-covered stones and a few upright slabs break the ground. Together, they are the ghost of a structure measuring perhaps fourteen metres by six and a half, its identity preserved less by physical evidence than by the persistence of local memory.

The site is known as Séipéal na nUltach, the Ulsterman's Chapel. The antiquarian Power, writing in 1908, identified it as a small oblong enclosure of dry stone, and the name itself carries an intriguing ambiguity. "Ultach" most obviously translates as a person from Ulster, but Power also noted that in County Waterford, and possibly across Munster more broadly, the word could denote a professional fortune-teller or wise person. Whether the chapel belonged to a wandering northerner or a local seer of some kind, the name has outlasted almost everything else. When Holland examined the site in 1984, there were still a few courses of dry-stone walling surviving from the southern wall, large uncut sandstone blocks stacked without mortar to a height of half a metre. A sandstone pillar with a distinctive circular head, sixty centimetres tall, was also recorded at the time. It has since disappeared.

The site lies close to a fork in a trackway, roughly four metres north-west of Rian Bó Phádraig, an ancient routeway whose name translates as the Track of Saint Patrick's Cow, one of several such linear earthworks associated in local tradition with the saint's journeys across Munster. What remains at Kildanoge today is largely a matter of reading the landscape carefully: tumbled stone, overgrowth, and two aligned blocks that mark the approximate limits of something that was once, by some account, a place of either worship or wisdom.

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