Church, Kildimo, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Churches & Chapels
A graveyard in County Limerick holds a peculiar kind of absence at its centre.
Where a Church of Ireland building once stood, there is now a modern private house, its gable sitting roughly four metres outside the western boundary of the burial ground. The church it replaced was itself a rebuilding, and before that stood an earlier church, and before that, if the antiquarians are right, something older still. Each layer has been swallowed by the next, leaving a site where the accumulation of centuries has somehow resulted in almost nothing to see.
The place-name itself is the most durable thing here. Kildimo derives from Cill Dioma, meaning the church of Diomma, a figure identified in early sources as the son of Cass, king of Munster, associated with the area around 450 to 480 AD. The medieval parish sat within the territory of Kenry, in County Limerick, and its name appears in various spellings across the documentary record: Kelldima in 1201, Kildyme in 1302, Kildyma in 1418. In 1358, a David Dencourt held the perpetual vicarage of Kildim; on his death in 1363, it passed to one John Pastyn, described in the papal records as a poor priest. The parish and its associated lands were granted in 1666 under the Act of Settlement. A Church of Ireland building rebuilt in 1705 was described by the topographer Samuel Lewis in 1837 as small and neat. By 1840, a contributor to the Ordnance Survey Letters noted that the churchyard contained nothing to attract the notice of the antiquarian. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland assessed the site in 1996, no surface remains of the early church were visible at all. A later nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building subsequently replaced the 1705 structure, and that too is now gone.
The graveyard itself remains in use and is accessible. There is no standing fabric of any early ecclesiastical phase, and visitors should not expect visible medieval or early Christian remains. What makes the site worth pausing over is less what can be seen than what the sequence of replacement implies: a Christian site of possible fifth-century origin, continuously overlaid, until even its most recent institutional building has been converted into a dwelling. Aerial imagery from 2011 onwards clearly shows the house occupying what was the church footprint. The burial ground to its east is the last legible element of a very long chain.
