Aglish Church (in Ruins), Graigaheesha, Co. Tipperary

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Aglish Church (in Ruins), Graigaheesha, Co. Tipperary

A circular graveyard sits slightly raised above the flat Tipperary pasture around it, enclosed by a moated earthwork, and somewhere beneath the grass at its western end lie the last traces of a church.

What survives amounts to a low fragment of wall-footing, no more than thirty centimetres high, representing what may be the south-west gable. The whole ruin stretches barely six metres east to west. It is the kind of site that asks more questions than it answers, not least because the moated enclosure surrounding it, a roughly circular earthen boundary of the sort sometimes used to demarcate ecclesiastical or manorial land, may actually predate both the church and the graveyard that now occupy it.

The church was known locally as Shan Aglish, and writing in the 1870s a historian named Healy recorded its foundations as measuring 51 feet long and 21 feet wide (approximately 14.7 by 6.8 metres), built on a mound or moat some forty yards in diameter. He noted that the church faced south, towards the neighbouring Kilcooly Abbey, whose demesne wall still runs along the west and north-west of the graveyard today. The relationship with Kilcooly may not have been merely geographical. An inquisition held at Kilcooly in 1530, cited in Archdall's Monasticon Hibernicum, suggests that this church was the rectory of the Grange of Heishe, and that during the reign of Henry VIII it was appropriated to the Abbot of Kilcooly. A nearby ringfort lies some 430 metres to the south-east, suggesting the area was settled long before any ecclesiastical arrangement was formalised. Beside the graveyard there is also a dry well known locally as Simon's Well, unmentioned by Healy but recorded more recently. Two stone slabs stand near it, one carrying a late 18th-century inscription, quietly maintaining a presence that the church itself can no longer manage.

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