Church, Dunmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Dunmore, Co. Kilkenny

At a graveyard on the edge of the River Nore's flood plain in County Kilkenny, there is nothing left to see.

No walls, no floor plan, no rubble outline. What was once known as Domhnach Mór na Trionóide Naomhtha, the great church of the Holy Trinity, has vanished entirely from the ground surface, leaving an irregularly shaped burial ground as the only physical sign that something significant once stood here. The most visible remnant of the building is not even on the site: a fragment of moulded round-headed arch from the church doorway, with the date 1604 carved into the spandrel, was salvaged when the church came down and is now set into the external wall of the house directly opposite the graveyard entrance.

The layers of history here are difficult to untangle. Scholars differ on whether a medieval parish church was substantially rebuilt in the seventeenth century or simply refitted, and no physical evidence survives to settle the question. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the site, the building in use was described as a modern Protestant church with a burial ground attached. Within a few decades even that was gone; a record from 1876 to 1878 notes that the Church of Dunmore had been recently thrown down, and Carrigan, writing in 1905, confirmed that no remains of the ancient Holy Trinity church survived. Among the furnishings dispersed before or during demolition was a bell bearing an inscription indicating it had been donated by James, Duke of Ormonde in 1682. The same source suggests Ormonde may also have given the church its distinctive white and black flagstones. Both the bell and the flagstones were removed to St Mary's Church in Kilkenny city, where they presumably remain.

The graveyard sits on gently sloping ground with open views in most directions, and the Nore runs roughly fifty metres to the south-west. The salvaged arch fragment in the house wall opposite is the one dateable piece of the church still visible in anything like its original county, though relocated by a matter of metres rather than miles.

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