Church, Freneystown, Co. Kilkenny

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Freneystown, Co. Kilkenny

At Freneystown in County Kilkenny, a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building was demolished because it had no congregation, raised on the cleared rubble of a medieval Catholic church, and then left to collapse in its turn.

What remains today is a ruinous shell of nave and chancel, its walls smothered in ivy, its interior choked with fallen masonry and self-seeded trees, a two-storey bell-tower still standing at the western end. The walls are thick enough, at around 85 centimetres, to suggest that some of the stonework pre-dates the Victorian rebuilding, but the vegetation has made it impossible to say with any certainty where one century ends and another begins.

The sequence of religious activity on this ridge above a steep river valley is considerably older than either church. An early medieval church and graveyard lie some 85 metres to the east, and a grave-slab found approximately 20 metres west of the later building points to a 13th or 14th-century phase of use on this spot. The historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that fragments of the pre-Reformation Catholic church were still visible around 1820, when they were cleared to make way for the Protestant building. That church, lacking any worshippers after Irish Church disestablishment in 1869, was subsequently taken down, though not entirely; the standing walls and bell-tower are what was left behind. A holy well dedicated to St Scoheen sits roughly 20 metres south of the church, incorporated into the graveyard's southern boundary wall, an arrangement that ties an older devotional tradition into the fabric of the later enclosure. Freneystown Castle, 545 metres to the southeast, looks down over the whole cluster of sites from the higher ground.

The graveyard itself is enclosed by a nineteenth-century wall and is still largely intact as a space, even as the church within it continues its slow disappearance under growth. The pointed doorway that once served as the main entrance, set into the south wall of the bell-tower, is worth looking for, as are traces of at least three large windows along the south wall of the nave, now half-obscured by ivy.

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