Ballymacadam Church (in ruins), Ballymacadam, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
In a largely disused farmyard on a north-facing slope in County Tipperary, a medieval church is quietly doing duty as a barn.
The corrugated iron roof, the concrete render slapped over the original stonework, the large doorway punched through the south wall for agricultural access, the water tank bolted to the east end: none of this is what the building was built for, yet the bones of the original structure survive beneath and within the alterations, readable if you know what to look for.
The church is a rectangular structure, roughly 8.2 metres by 18 metres, and was, according to P. Power writing in 1908, a dependency of the Augustinian Abbey at Cahir, the substantial monastic house that once dominated that nearby town. As a dependency it would have served a subordinate function within the abbey's network of properties and spiritual obligations. The walls were lowered at some point during the conversion, the west gable rebuilt above the original one metre of surviving masonry, but enough medieval fabric remains to make the adaptation legible. The east gable, standing to around six metres, still carries a pointed two-light window with a limestone mullion, the kind of narrow, carefully dressed opening typical of late medieval Irish ecclesiastical work. The base-batter, a splayed thickening at the foot of the wall that adds structural stability, survives to between one and two metres in height. Cut limestone quoins, the dressed corner-stones that give a wall its structural discipline and finish, are still visible where the concrete render has not obscured them. Inside, an aumbry, a small wall recess used to store sacred vessels, sits near the east end of the south wall, and beside it a possible blocked opening whose original purpose is unclear. Bedrock at the south-west angle was used directly as a foundation for the west gable, a practical solution and a detail that suggests the builders were working carefully with the particular conditions of this sloped site.
The farmyard setting means the building is not publicly accessible in any formal sense, and much of its original surface has been obscured by successive layers of agricultural pragmatism. What survives is a patchwork: medieval stonework, Victorian or later intervention, and the quiet indifference of a building that has been useful in too many ways to be treated reverently.