Balleen Church (in ruins), Balleen Little, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
A small ruined church in County Kilkenny is unusual for what is absent as much as what remains.
There is no associated graveyard visible at ground level, which is striking for a medieval ecclesiastical site; the building appears to have functioned not as a parish church for a local community but as a private chapel serving the castle roughly a hundred metres to the north. That relationship between the two structures, one religious and one defensive, sitting on adjacent plateaus below a hill crest, gives the place a quietly domestic quality that distinguishes it from the grander ruins of the Kilkenny countryside.
The church is a simple rectangular structure, approximately fourteen metres east to west and six metres north to south, built from roughly coursed rubble with walls about 0.9 metres thick. By 1839, when Ordnance Survey officers recorded it in their field letters, it was already substantially ruined. The surveyors noted a breach in the north wall where the door was presumed to have stood, and described a small flat-headed window set high in the west gable, formed from five cut stones and tapering sharply, wide on the inside and barely 0.075 metres across on the outside face. That west gable still stands to around 5.5 metres, though scrub growth obscures its upper portion; the east gable has largely collapsed into an overgrown mound of rubble. The historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, confirmed the view that this was a castle chapel rather than a communal place of worship. Perhaps the most intriguing detail connected with the site is a sheela-na-gig, a carved stone figure of a type associated with medieval Irish churches and tower houses, possibly apotropaic in function, which was at some point removed from the church or the adjacent castle and set into a wall at the nearby farmyard, where it remains today.