Church (in ruins), Patrickswell, Co. Tipperary

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Patrickswell, Co. Tipperary

A ruined church sitting in a wet, marshy valley below a steep east-facing outcrop is an unusual enough setting, but what makes this site at Patrickswell stranger still is the accumulation of things that do not quite belong there.

The church itself is flanked by a holy well to the north and a stone cross rising from an artificial pond to the north-east. Inside, a collection of architectural fragments, an altar-tomb, and an armorial stone have been gathered from an entirely separate building, the White memorial chapel that once stood attached to St. Mary's Church in Clonmel. The church, then, functions partly as a ruin and partly as an impromptu repository for pieces of the past that might otherwise have been lost.

The building itself is a compact limestone rectangle, roughly 12.77 metres long and just over 5 metres wide, with gables rising to around 6 metres. Its windows mix flat-headed and ogee-headed lights, the ogee being a sinuous S-curved arch common in later medieval Irish stonework, and the east gable carries a two-light cusped ogee window set slightly off-centre, suggesting some care was once taken over its appearance. The doorway jamb carries Romanesque decoration, a carved chevron with interlace and beading, pointing to an earlier phase of the structure beneath later alterations. Nicholas Fagan, Abbot of the Cistercian house at Inislaunaght, was buried here in 1617, and just two years later Pope Paul V issued a papal bull granting an indulgence to those who visited the church, a document that implies the site held some active devotional significance at that moment. It continued in Catholic use through to the end of the eighteenth century. Renovations carried out between 1967 and 1969, probably connected to works at the adjacent St. Patrick's Well, account for the repointing of the exterior and the concrete-set flagstone floor inside. One object documented during those earlier, quieter decades before renovation was a carved wooden block bearing a ringed cross, drawn by the artist George Victor Du Noyer sometime in the 1830s or 1840s. The scholar Peter Harbison later proposed that this may have been a leg from a medieval wooden altar original to the church, though nothing of it survives today.

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