Church (in Ruins), Ballybought, Co. Kildare

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Church (in Ruins), Ballybought, Co. Kildare

Somewhere in a Kildare graveyard, a narrow Gothic window survives in what remains of an east gable wall, two granite pillars carrying carved granite stones up into an arch just over a metre wide and more than two metres tall in its splayed opening. It is, by almost any measure, the most complete thing left of this church. The rest amounts to low rubble-limestone courses, overgrown and split, with the north side wall reduced in places to little more than a few courses of stone barely above the ground.

The church's decline was rapid once it began. A record from 1615 describes it as having been repaired, suggesting it was still considered worth saving at that point. Within fifteen years, by 1630, both the church and its chancel had fallen. By the time a contributor to the Ordnance Survey Letters was passing through in 1839, only one gable remained standing, and he noted a small stone cross placed above the window. When the local historian Walshe examined the site in the early twentieth century, he recorded the window in careful detail but made no mention of any cross, raising the quiet question of when it disappeared, and whether it was lost to weather, to hands, or simply to the accumulating indifference of time. The building itself was a modest rectangle, roughly 12.7 metres east to west and 5.2 metres north to south, constructed from rubble limestone with walls around 0.9 metres thick.

The east gable still stands to a height of about 2.2 metres at its surviving southern end, clad in ivy. It is set within a graveyard, as it has been throughout the centuries of its ruin, and the window remains its most legible feature, its proportions precise enough that Walshe could measure them to the nearest quarter inch nearly a century ago.

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