Church, Ardmayle Church in Ruins, Grave Yard, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary

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Church, Ardmayle Church in Ruins, Grave Yard, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary

At Ardmayle in County Tipperary, a medieval tower stands attached to a Protestant church built in 1815, and the junction between the two tells an odd story.

The tower is the older survivor, a limestone rubble structure with a base-batter, which is the angled splaying of the wall at ground level designed to add stability and deflect attackers, and it predates the Georgian church by several centuries. Yet the two buildings are joined as though they belong together, the tower grafted onto the west end of the later nave, creating a composite structure that reads simultaneously as ruin and working building. Further east across the graveyard, a low grass-covered ridge may be the remains of a medieval chancel wall, and beyond it a slight mound, barely half a metre high, sits in ambiguous silence, possibly a buried wall, possibly something older.

The tower itself rewards close attention. Its ground floor is barrel-vaulted and lit by a narrow loop set in a deep-splayed embrasure, and two small angled vent holes pierce the wall thickness at ground-floor level, exiting just above the base-batter outside. Their precise function is not obvious. The upper floors were altered considerably, with inserted wooden stairs, a chimney flue, and modern floors at several levels, one of which sits so high it cuts across original window openings. At the third floor, seven ogee-headed windows survive, some with plain spandrels, some hollow, some decorated, and one in the north wall is a two-light opening. The parapet, rebuilt in the nineteenth century, was given crow-stepped gables and a turret at the north-east angle. A nineteenth-century doorway carved in a deliberately medieval style was inserted into the north face at ground level, a period touch that blurs the boundary between original fabric and later intervention. Ordnance Survey letters compiled by O'Flanagan in the 1930s, drawing on earlier fieldwork, noted the puzzling distance between the tower and the fragmentary walls to the east, and wondered whether those eastern walls could really belong to the same church at all.

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