Buolick Church (in ruins), Buolick, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Churches & Chapels

Buolick Church (in ruins), Buolick, Co. Tipperary

Inside the ruined nave of this Tipperary church, just east of the south doorway, there is a holy water stoup that does not quite fit the usual mould.

Rather than the simple carved bowl found in most medieval parish churches, this one presents a circular basin set within a semi-decagonal surround, the whole thing resting on a pyramidal corbel of matching profile. It is an oddly intricate piece of craftsmanship for a rural site, and it signals that the building as a whole rewards closer attention than its grass-grown setting might suggest.

The site sits on a low north-to-south ridge surrounded by pasture, with a tower house visible less than two hundred metres to the east-north-east and the earthworks of a ringwork and bailey, a type of early medieval defensive enclosure, roughly 376 metres beyond that. The church itself is a multi-period structure, its nave measuring over 23 metres in length, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with occasional sandstone blocks. Buolick appears in the Register of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist without the New Gate from around 1210 and continues into the early fourteenth century, and the settlement is also listed in Papal taxation records of approximately 1302 and 1306. The chancel, which abuts the already-harled east wall of the nave, is thought to be a fourteenth or early fifteenth-century addition, and a three-storey tower at the west end was probably added around the same time. That tower was originally lower, with a gabled roof, the ghost outline of which is still legible on the external west face beneath the present crenellated battlements. The crude loop windows in its surviving walls point to a bell-tower function rather than residential use. A late fifteenth or sixteenth-century remodelling left its mark across the whole building in the form of punch-dressed stonework within drafted margins on the doorways and windows, a finish characteristic of that period in Irish ecclesiastical architecture. The chancel retains a sandstone piscina, a shallow basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels, though its bowl is missing and a slate base has been inserted in its place. Ogee-headed windows, a pointed chancel arch resting on pyramidal corbels, and a two-light east window inserted into an earlier embrasure together give the interior a layered quality, each feature belonging to a different moment in a building history that stretched across several centuries. Headstones within the nave range from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, so the site remained in use as a burial place long after the roof was gone.

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