Church, Rosenallis, Co. Laois

Volunteers clearing the churchyard beside the Church of Ireland building uncovered a sheela-na-gig, a cross-inscribed slab, and fragments of dressed stone, all remnants of a medieval church whose foundations had been largely forgotten beneath the soil. A sheela-na-gig is a carved stone figure, typically female and explicitly sexual, found on medieval churches and castles across Ireland and Britain; their precise meaning remains disputed, but they appear with some regularity on ecclesiastical sites. Both the sheela-na-gig and the cross-slab were subsequently taken into the care of the National Museum of Ireland. What remains in situ is a single fragment of traceried sandstone window, resting against the eastern graveyard wall, described as similar to the east window of Kilmanman church. It is, by all accounts, the last physical trace of the medieval building.

The history attached to this hilltop site is layered and, in places, contradictory. In 1302, the settlement then known as Oregan or Rosenallis was transferred to the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, a military and nursing order based at Kilmainham in Dublin. Following the dissolution of religious houses under the Tudors, a 21-year lease of the rectories and tithes of Rosenallis was granted between 1547 and 1553 to William Vaughan and Greffyth ap David, described as yeomen, as part of the dispersed possessions of the former Hospital of St John. By 1629, Bishop of Kildare Dr Ross McGeoghan was recording the church as a parochial foundation dedicated to St Brigid, naming it in Latin as "Ecclesia San Brigidae de Rosenallis", though other sources suggest a dedication to the Virgin Mary instead. Earlier still, the site may have had a round tower of sorts; an early nineteenth-century account describes a narrow steeple of rough masonry, only one third the height of the well-known round tower at Timahoe, which was pulled down before 1838, leaving no trace. The medieval church foundations themselves were only rediscovered incidentally, when a grave was being opened sometime in the mid-twentieth century.

The sandstone window fragment propped against the eastern graveyard wall is easy to overlook, but it rewards a close look. A holy well associated with the site lies to the south-west of the graveyard.