Church, Glebe, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Glebe, Co. Longford

A graveyard in County Longford holds the memory of a medieval parish church through fragments rather than walls.

The building itself has vanished so completely that even its grass-covered foundations, still faintly legible in 1977, have since been erased by levelling work. What survives is scattered and improvised: a fragment of a round-headed window set into the stile beside the entrance gate, an octagonal cross-shaft cemented onto the top of the surrounding wall, and what is likely a stoup, a small basin once used to hold holy water, worked into the wall's fabric. Several memorial stones have been removed from their original positions and built into the same wall. The church has been absorbed, piece by piece, into its own boundary.

The foundation here is associated with St Eiche, and the site belongs to a tradition of early ecclesiastical settlement at Kilglass. By the fifteenth century it was functioning as a conventional parish church dedicated to St Echich; in 1407 it was assigned to Maurice Macgillavanaeim, archdeacon of Ardagh, and in 1465 William Obranaguyn held the position of perpetual vicar. The rectory passed into secular hands in 1542, when it was leased to Walter Tirrell of Dublin. A church at a location recorded as 'Aghnesherg' appears on an early seventeenth-century map of Ardagh barony, in a position that broadly corresponds with this townland. Writing in 1954, McNamee noted that local tradition identified a mound within the graveyard as the church's site, even at a time when no physical remains were thought to survive. Roughly forty metres to the south-south-west, a motte and bailey, the earthwork remains of a type of Norman fortification consisting of a raised mound beside an enclosed courtyard, adds a further layer to the long occupation of this quiet corner of Longford.

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