Church, Ballynagally, Co. Limerick
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Churches & Chapels
A medieval church that leaves almost no trace above ground is a strange kind of historical presence, but that is precisely what survives at Ballynagally in County Limerick.
The site associated with the old parish of Aglishcormick is marked not by walls or arches but by a low, irregular earthwork within a graveyard, a sunken rectangular interior scattered with small loose stones, and the faint outline of banks that once defined something more substantial. The church itself has vanished entirely; what remains is essentially the ghost of a building, legible only in the shape of the ground.
T. J. Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, traced the documentary history of Aglishcormick through a succession of spelling variants: the chapel appears as Lyscormuck in 1291, Liscormyg in 1302, and was recorded as being held with the parishes of Gryen and Tuath Clugin in 1558. The place name itself belongs to a recognisable Irish type, combining the word for church with a personal name, in this case Cormac. By 1657 the settlement was recorded in both Down Survey documents and Petty's mapping as Aglishcormick and Eglishcormick. Westropp noted bluntly that there were no remains save the glebe, the land historically attached to a parish church for the support of its clergy, at Ballynegally. The Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1840 described the graveyard as a small burial place in a cultivated field, roughly 26 metres long and 15 metres wide, its enclosing ditch already mouldered away, its surface green and dotted with a few small stones used as headstones, and by that point serving mainly as a burial ground for children.
Within the northern side of the graveyard enclosure, survey work has identified a rectangular area measuring approximately 3.7 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, defined by low earthen and stone banks. The northern bank is the most substantial, reaching an internal height of around 0.45 metres, with shorter returns on the east and west sides. The interior is sunken and generally level, with frequent small stones scattered across it, ranging from roughly 15 to 20 centimetres in length. The site sits within an ordinary agricultural landscape, and there is nothing to announce it from a distance. Visitors should expect a quiet, unmarked graveyard in a field rather than anything monumental; the interest lies in reading the landscape carefully and understanding that the low banks underfoot are all that is left of a parish church with a documented history stretching back to the late thirteenth century.