Church in Ruins, Ballinure, Co. Tipperary

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Church in Ruins, Ballinure, Co. Tipperary

At the western end of a ruined church in Ballinure, Co. Tipperary, there is a barrel-vaulted two-storey chamber that served as a priest's residence, its elliptical-headed doorway still dressed with chamfered limestone jambs of sixteenth or seventeenth-century appearance.

Inside, eighteenth and nineteenth-century memorial stones line the walls alongside a set of small corbels, projecting stone brackets that may once have supported shelving. The church itself sits within a graveyard of unusual hexagonal shape, and the whole site is so heavily draped in ivy that key features, including a two-light east window and a double belfry on the west gable, are effectively hidden from view. What ivy has not consumed, time has: the north wall has largely collapsed, the south wall survives to only about two metres, and whether the vaulted chamber was an original part of the structure or inserted at a later date remains an open question.

The ruin was already old when it appeared in the Down Survey parish maps of 1655 to 1656, which note simply that Ballinure was a place whereon stands a Ruined Church. The rectangular limestone building measures roughly nineteen and a half metres east to west, and both gables survive to full height despite the general decay. A base-batter, a slight outward slope at the foot of a wall designed to add stability, is still visible on the east gable. By the 1840s, when Ordnance Survey officers recorded their observations in what are known as the OS Letters, the belfry on the west gable was still standing and was topped with a stone cross; that cross was subsequently removed. Writing in 1892, Davis White noted that the west gable and the ground beside it had at some point been pressed into service as a ball court, which says something about how the site was regarded by that era. Lying in the graveyard to the east is a stone ridge-piece from the original church roof, complete with the socket for a decorative roof finial, a detail closely paralleled at the early medieval church at Derrynaflan, also in Tipperary.

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