Church (in ruins), Ballynaraha, Co. Tipperary

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Ballynaraha, Co. Tipperary

On a south-facing slope just below the summit of a hill in County Tipperary, a small ruined church looks out over the Suir river valley.

What makes it quietly odd is not its age or its decay but the evidence of its own complicated afterlife: walls crudely rebuilt with unmortared limestone rubble, a window that was blocked up during an earlier phase of the building's use, and a west wall that has vanished entirely. The structure reads less like a single ruin and more like a series of improvisations laid one on top of another.

The church is modest in scale, roughly six metres north to south and just under fifteen metres east to west, and it sits on the northern edge of a graveyard that still occupies the hilltop. Of the original fabric, only the eastern portion of the north wall survives to any appreciable height, rising to around three and a half metres and built from randomly coursed limestone rubble with occasional sandstone masonry. The east wall has been reconstructed to a height of two metres, and traces of a single-light window remain on both the inner and outer faces of the north wall, though the embrasure, the splayed recess that would have framed the opening, survives only on one side. The most affecting detail is set into the east end of the south wall: a limestone wall memorial with a central plaque, now very faded, and an incised scroll carved to either side of it. The inscription is difficult to read but is thought to date from around 1730, suggesting that someone considered this half-collapsed structure a meaningful enough place to mark a death within living memory of that date.

The ruin sits within pasture and is accessible via the graveyard, which remains in use. The memorial plaque on the south wall is worth examining closely despite, or perhaps because of, its near-illegibility; the carved scrolls on either side are clearer than the inscription they flank.

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Pete F
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