Church, Glashare, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
A graveyard with a name but no church to show for it sits in low-lying pasture near the floodplain of a river in County Kilkenny.
The enclosure is roughly square, the grass unremarkable, and there is nothing above ground to suggest that a place of worship ever stood here. It is the kind of absence that quietly insists on being explained.
The burial ground carries the Irish name Teampall Ghlaise Air, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 and glossed there as meaning Gleshare Church, which at least confirms that local memory of a church persisted well into the nineteenth century. By then, however, the physical evidence was already gone. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that some fragments of the church were uprooted in 1832, a date specific enough to suggest that the clearance was remembered and possibly lamented. Whatever remained of the structure after that was either taken away for building material or simply disappeared into the ground. The site lies approximately a hundred metres south-east of Glashare Castle, placing it within a broader medieval landscape where settlement, defence, and religious life were once concentrated in close proximity.