Church, Fanningstown (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
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A graveyard in County Limerick holds the memory of a medieval church that has now entirely vanished from sight.
Known locally as Templeroe, the building once associated with the Knights Templar, that medieval religious and military order active across Europe and the Holy Land, has left nothing above ground. Where walls once stood in Fanningstown, there is only grass and the quiet company of headstones.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, pieced together the settlement's naming history: the townland appears as Ballyanhiny or Fanningstown in 1410, and as Faningstowne in the parish of Fedamore by 1586. The church itself was attributed to the Templars in Samuel Lewis's topographical dictionary. By the time the Ordnance Survey teams came through in 1840, the situation was already one of significant loss. Their notes record foundations measuring roughly 40 feet in length by 16 feet in breadth, sitting only about one and a half feet above the surface. A figure of 38 feet by 16 feet appears in a separate Ordnance Survey letter of the same period, suggesting the surveyors were working from slightly different vantage points or measurements. O'Kelly, writing in 1943, confirmed that even those modest traces had since disappeared entirely.
Fanningstown graveyard lies in the parish of Fedamore, south of Limerick city. The graveyard itself remains in use, so access is generally straightforward, though there is nothing architecturally to examine once you arrive. The interest here is more archaeological and imaginative than visual. The north side of the graveyard is where the foundations were last recorded, so that is the area worth looking at closely, even if the ground reveals nothing obvious to the untrained eye. For anyone with an interest in the Templars in Ireland or in the way medieval ecclesiastical sites can dissolve almost entirely into the landscape, Templeroe offers a quietly instructive case of absence.