Church in ruins, Grave Yard, Cooleagh, Co. Tipperary

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Church in ruins, Grave Yard, Cooleagh, Co. Tipperary

By at least 1615, the church at Cooleagh was already a ruin.

A Royal Visitation of that approximate date recorded it in Latin as having no curate and both the church and chancel fallen into disrepair, the living absorbed into a deanery rather than serving any active parish. What stands in a gently undulating patch of rough Tipperary pasture today is therefore the remnant of a building that had already been abandoned for generations before most of the country's other ruined churches met their fate.

The surviving fabric is modest but specific. Two sections of wall remain from what was once a simple limestone church aligned east to west, as was customary for Christian worship, so that the congregation faced towards Jerusalem during prayer. The south wall runs a little over twelve metres and stands to a height of nearly three and a half metres; the west gable, now thickly cloaked in ivy on its outer face, reaches close to five metres, with trees pushing up through the collapsed rubble at its base. The masonry is roughly coursed limestone, but the southwest angle retains cut and dressed quoins, the corner stones worked with more care than the general fabric, suggesting at least some architectural ambition in the original build. The doorway in the south wall has lost most of its stonework, though its flat segmental-arched inner embrasure, the recessed opening on the interior face, is still legible. Two jamb stones with double-chamfered edges, a detail typical of late medieval ecclesiastical carpentry and stonework, have been found lying in the graveyard, one near the doorway and one to the southeast. The graveyard itself is sub-rectangular, bounded by a limestone wall capped with cement, with a ditch cut along the inside of the northern boundary, its upcast thrown inward to form a low earthen bank. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 noted two small plots of glebelands, the agricultural ground attached to a church for the support of its clergy, ditched about near the church, suggesting the site retained some recognisable organisation even a generation or two after the building had fallen silent.

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