Church, Glebe, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Glebe, Co. Limerick

Most old Irish churches align themselves east to west, orienting the altar towards the rising sun.

The medieval ruin at Kilkeedy glebe in County Limerick does the opposite. Its greatest length runs north to south, a peculiarity noted by observers as far back as 1840, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the anomaly and concluded that the surviving fragment was never a complete church in its own right but rather a lateral wing, something formerly attached to a larger building that has since entirely vanished. The 1813 Church of Ireland structure, now also roofless and disused, appears to occupy the ground where that larger building once stood, so the site holds three overlapping phases of religious architecture, none of them quite explaining the others.

The parish of Kilkeedy, in the barony of Pubblebrian, appears in the records as Kelliedun in 1201 and Kilkid by 1302. By 1369, a papal petition records that Thomas de Burgo had held the perpetual vicarage of Kylkyde, which had since lapsed to the Pope, suggesting the parish had fallen into some administrative disorder. The church was dedicated to Saints Simon and Jude by 1410, and its rectories were granted to a G. Moore in 1578 following the dissolution of Athassell Priory in Tipperary. A visitation of 1615 found the building still in repair, roofed with thatch. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, described the surviving medieval fragment as a north wing measuring roughly 29 feet by 18 feet, with a defaced window in the east wall and a doorway in the west wall featuring a round arch of cut limestone on the outside and flat stone flags forming the arch within. Monuments inside commemorate Samuel Cooper of Cooper Hill, who died in 1779, and a James and Mary Berry. The 1813 church was built under the Board of First Fruits, a body that funded Protestant church construction across Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it retains its square tower with a hexagonal limestone spire, crenellated corners, and a rubble limestone nave, though it has long since lost its roof. A mausoleum for the Monsell family is attached to a block on the north-west.

The site is approached through a pair of rendered limestone piers with a metal gate to the west, and there is also a stile in the boundary wall for those on foot. The graveyard remains in use or at least tended, so the grounds are generally accessible. The medieval fragment sits close against the south end of the 1813 nave, and it is worth taking time to examine the doorway carefully; the contrast between the rough interior arch of thin flat stones and the more formal cut limestone round arch on the exterior is clearly visible despite centuries of weathering. A further fragment of walling stands roughly nine feet to the east, featureless as the Ordnance Survey correspondent complained, but present nonetheless.

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