Church (in ruins), Temple-Etney, Co. Tipperary

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Temple-Etney, Co. Tipperary

Sitting on a gentle rise in south Tipperary, all that remains of the church at Temple-Etney is barely knee-high in places, yet what little survives is doing a quietly remarkable amount of work.

Lodged into the reconstructed low drystone walls are fragments of engaged columns bearing the rounded roll-mouldings characteristic of Romanesque architecture, the style that flourished in Ireland roughly between the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, with its distinctive carved stonework and decorative arcading. These fragments sit alongside chamfered sandstone pieces and broken headstones, all pressed into service as building material during a graveyard clean-up in 1985. Resting on top of the west end of the north wall is a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more deliberate cup-shaped hollows ground into it, found at many early Irish ecclesiastical sites and generally associated with ritual use, though their precise function is debated.

By the time the Civil Survey recorded the site in 1654 to 1656, the building was already described simply as "a little church unroofed," suggesting it had been out of use for some time before that mid-seventeenth-century survey was compiled. The church measures roughly 15.3 metres east to west and 5.15 metres north to south, with walls around a metre thick where they survive at all. The most substantial original fabric remaining is a stretch of the east end of the north wall, standing to about 0.75 metres, with what may be original stonework at the east angle, though it is not possible to confirm whether the corner stones are properly tied in. Mid to late eighteenth-century headstones found within the church outline suggest the graveyard continued to be used long after the building itself had fallen. The irregular shape of the surrounding graveyard, on a northeast-facing slope in undulating pasture, is itself suggestive of considerable age, as early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures frequently follow an organic, roughly oval plan rather than the regular rectangles of later periods.

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