Church, Cooneen, Co. Tipperary

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Cooneen, Co. Tipperary

What makes the ruined church at Cooneen quietly unsettling is a small detail recorded around 1840: children were still being buried within its standing walls.

The building had long since collapsed into rubble, yet it continued to serve as a place of interment, its roofless limestone shell treated as consecrated ground by the surrounding community. Some of the loose stones scattered across the interior floor may not be fallen masonry at all, but burial markers, though it is now almost impossible to tell one from the other.

The church sits in pasture at the eastern end of an east-west ridge in north Tipperary, positioned just off the crest so that the ground drops sharply to the south toward the Nenagh River below. It is a modest rectangular structure, roughly 11.7 metres long and 5.75 metres wide, built from limestone rubble with walls about 0.9 metres thick. Most of it has collapsed, with the north wall surviving to the greatest height, reaching under a metre on the interior face. A wide entrance, 3.3 metres across, sits roughly in the centre of the west wall, and there are traces of what may have been a porch on that same end. The church was already of sufficient standing to be listed in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Killaloe in 1302, a survey that assessed the value of church property across Ireland for papal revenue purposes. Inside, against the east wall, a small lintelled stone chamber measuring 1.8 by 0.9 metres was constructed at some point; nineteenth-century sources suggest it may have served as a vault for a priest buried in the north-east corner of the church. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the building enclosed within a trapezoidal boundary described as a burial ground, and traces of that enclosing wall are still visible to the west and north-east of the ruins.

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