Church (in ruins), Springhouse, Co. Tipperary

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Church (in ruins), Springhouse, Co. Tipperary

Sitting on the flat top of a broad Tipperary ridge, with pasture falling away to the south, this medieval ruin carries considerably more documentary weight than its modest surviving walls might suggest.

What remains is a small rectangular church built from limestone and sandstone rubble, heavily smothered in ivy, with a 19th-century church standing separately at the base of the slope below. The two buildings in proximity can cause a moment of confusion, but it is the older structure on the ridge that rewards closer attention.

The medieval church appears by name in the Register of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist without the New Gate, Dublin, recorded in 1292/3 and again in 1319, placing it within a network of ecclesiastical landholding that stretched far beyond Tipperary. It also features in Papal Taxation records of around 1302 and 1306, and still merited inclusion in the Extents of Irish Monastic Possessions compiled in 1541, a survey conducted after the Dissolution of the Monasteries that catalogued what had once belonged to religious houses. The structure measures roughly 14.7 metres east to west and 5.5 metres north to south. Of the original fabric, only the west gable, the western section of the south wall, and the east gable with short returns of both flanking walls still stand, all of them thickly wrapped in ivy. A substantial buttress runs along the west gable, and a limestone door jamb with an external chamfer lies near where the south-wall entrance once was. Inside, a square holy water stoup sits in a recess in the thickness of the south wall, placed just to the left as a worshipper entered, exactly where one would expect it. The east gable retains a two-light ogee-headed window, the pointed cusped arch a marker of late medieval Gothic taste, and a single-light window survives at the west end of the south wall, largely hidden by vegetation. At the north end of the east wall there is a piscina, a shallow stone basin used by priests to rinse the vessels of the Mass, and the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 record that a window once opened immediately to the west of it, though that section of wall has since collapsed.

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