Church (in ruins), Garryntemple, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
A ruined church in Tipperary's quiet pastureland is guarded, at least as of the last recorded visit, by a chained dog in its own interior, while two old cars and an iron bed-head fill what was once the nave.
The east gable still stands to around six metres, its steep-pitched profile visible from the surrounding fields, but the west gable has vanished entirely, and the south wall has been broken through at its centre. What survives is a limestone rubble shell, roughly coursed and built to walls nearly a metre thick, sitting on a low natural hillock with the land falling gently away to the south-west.
The most curious feature of this building was recorded in 1840 by an Ordnance Survey correspondent, whose account was later published by O'Flanagan in 1930. The observer noted that the east gable once held three windows stacked vertically, one above the other, and remarked explicitly that this was "a thing very unusual in old Irish churches." The lowest of the three was already damaged by 1840; the middle one, about 3.6 metres from the ground on the outside, was roughly 1.6 metres square on the interior face and constructed of cut limestone, while externally it narrowed considerably and was built of brownish cut sandstone. The highest was a slender slit, barely 0.48 metres tall and 0.1 metres wide, also of cut sandstone. The west gable at that time carried two windows aligned with the upper pair in the east, one of which survived in good condition. What the 1840 account also noted, almost in passing, was that the graveyard adjoining the church had by then been ploughed up and was producing cabbages and turnips, the human remains, as the correspondent put it with some composure, having been "resolved into their ultimate elements." No trace of that graveyard is visible today.