Ballybacon Church (in ruins), Raheen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
What remains of the medieval church at Ballybacon is, by this point, more ivy than stone.
The entire south wall has disappeared entirely, and the building that stands in its place is a dense green mass on a gentle north-east-facing slope in County Tipperary pasture, with only the silhouettes of two gables and a north wall pressing through the growth to confirm that something architectural is actually there. That the east gable reaches roughly eight metres in height, and that a long lancet window, set within a wide splayed embrasure, survives near its centre, is a detail easy to miss unless you are looking for it. A lancet is a narrow, pointed window typical of Early Gothic construction, and the splayed embrasure, which widens inward from the opening, would have drawn light deep into the interior. The north wall retains an arched doorway near its western end, the arch itself still intact despite the surrounding masonry having been broken through at some point, and a buttress props the wall's eastern end from outside.
The church dates to the thirteenth century and is built of roughly coursed limestone and sandstone rubble, with a pronounced base-batter, a deliberate outward slope at the base of the wall designed to add structural stability and discourage water ingress. A west gable also survives, rising above an internal offset at 3.4 metres, and the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century and published by O'Flanagan in 1930, recorded a square window near the top of that gable, approximately six metres from the ground, though it is no longer visible. The graveyard surrounding the ruin contains a cross-slab, a carved stone marker associated with early Christian burial practice, which suggests a still earlier church stood on this site before the thirteenth-century building was raised. Headstones in the yard run from 1727 through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the twentieth. A medieval baptismal font, described by Cahill and Twohig in 1976, was recovered from the site and has since been moved to the nearby Roman Catholic church for safekeeping, leaving the ruin itself without one of the more tangible links to its liturgical past.
