Church, Corrabulbeg, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Churches & Chapels
A small ruined church that appears on no Ordnance Survey map, leaves no trace of a burial ground, and seems to have been noticed only twice by a single antiquarian who freely admitted he took no notes, is an unusual thing to try to account for.
Yet the outline of this rectangular structure at Corrabulbeg, County Limerick, survives well enough to be picked out from aerial photographs, sitting just beside the driveway of Tory Hill House, roughly 175 metres to the west of where the building once stood in more obvious form.
The place has a long and layered documentary trail, even if the physical remains are modest. The 1657 Down Survey map of Pubblebrian barony, a mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project that recorded landholding across Ireland in considerable detail, shows a chapel labelled in the townland then rendered as Knockdrumashell, standing beside a tower house castle. The site's Irish name, Cnoc Droma Asail, the hill of the ridge of the ass, appears in various anglicised forms across the centuries. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, traced the name and the land back considerably further: a 1418 ecclesiastical record refers to a Capella de Drumassyll as belonging to Cromothe, distinguished at the time from the nearby church at Kileenoghty, though later scholars questioned whether they were in fact the same place. Earlier still, legal disputes over land at Drumassell were recorded in 1289 and 1311, with Juliana Fitzgerald and Henry Berkeley both pressing claims. The Book of Rights places two forts in the area as early as 902, named Maghnasail and Asail. When Westropp visited personally, in 1876 and again in 1881, he found what he called a rude and featureless oblong ivied church, and, by his own admission, made neither notes nor sketches.
The site today is private land, adjacent to Tory Hill House, and there is no publicly marked access. The rectangular outline of the church is not visible on the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps, which makes the aerial photographic evidence the clearest modern record of its footprint. There is no associated churchyard or visible grave markers, which sets it apart from most ecclesiastical ruins of comparable age in the region. Anyone with an interest in early medieval and medieval church sites in County Limerick would find the documentary history here, stretching from tenth-century place names through to seventeenth-century cartography, considerably richer than the surviving masonry might suggest.