Church (in ruins), Kerdiffstown, Co. Kildare

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Kerdiffstown, Co. Kildare

Somewhere in the fabric of this ivy-clad ruin, a handsome early sixteenth-century window once survived intact enough to impress those who saw it, only to end up scattered in pieces across the surrounding graveyard before being gathered and carried off to Kerdiffstown House, roughly 400 metres to the north-north-east. Where those fragments are now, nobody seems to know. That quiet disappearance is perhaps the most telling thing about this church dedicated to St. Lawrence, a place that has shed its details gradually and with little ceremony.

The building itself is a rectangular structure of rubble limestone masonry, with a nave measuring about 12.9 metres east to west and a chancel that has been almost entirely levelled. The quoins, the dressed cornerstones, incorporate some tufa, a lightweight porous stone occasionally used in early Irish ecclesiastical building. The west end of the nave has collapsed to its lower courses, and a gap in the south wall may mark an original entrance. What does survive, and survives dramatically, is the east gable of the nave, which rises to a very steep pitch and contains a round-headed chancel arch of rubble masonry, set slightly off-centre towards the south. Round chancel arches of this kind are characteristic of Romanesque building, and the extreme pitch of the gable has led some to suggest the nave may predate the Norman arrival in Ireland, with the chancel added in a later phase. The architectural historian O'Carragáin has noted, however, that the nave and chancel could equally be contemporary constructions. The scar lines of the demolished chancel walls are still legible on the inner face of the gable, and thin projecting flags near its base once carried the lower edge of the chancel roof. Fitzgerald, writing in the early twentieth century, was the one who recorded both the dedication to St. Lawrence and the fate of that early sixteenth-century window, details that might otherwise have gone entirely unnoticed.

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