Church, Killadiskert, Co. Leitrim
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Churches & Chapels
Inside a small church in Killadiskert, County Leitrim, the man who built it is buried beneath the floor.
His horizontal memorial stone records, in plain terms, that the Reverend Myles McPartland "founded this church" and died in 1737. It is an unusual arrangement, the founder interred within his own creation, and it gives the building a biographical quality that most rural churches, however old, do not quite manage.
The church is known as Kilbride and was built by McPartland during his time as parish priest of Inishmagrath. A reference from 1704 may place it in the documentary record even before his death, suggesting construction sometime in the early eighteenth century. The doorway on the north wall carries a keystone incised with the date 1735, though this may have been added or reset later. The building itself is a compact rectangular structure of randomly-coursed sandstone with dressed quoins at the corners, measuring roughly 9.6 metres east to west, and it survives almost complete to a height of over 2.6 metres. Inside, joist-holes in the east and west walls mark where a ceiling once ran, and two cupboards are set into the south wall opposite the doorway. The east window is a two-light opening, each light round-headed, set within a flat-arched embrasure. The site may be considerably older than the present building: the Down Survey, a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project undertaken in the 1650s, shows a church at Fingreagh and Kivillin that is likely to have stood at this location. Kilbride itself was eventually superseded as the local Catholic church by the Old Bog church at Carrowlaur, roughly two kilometres to the south-west.
The church sits within a subrectangular graveyard defined by earthen banks and hedges, with a masonry wall along the northern edge beside a roadway. Abutting the north wall of the church is a small mortuary enclosure. In the field immediately to the north, a circular drystone holy well dedicated to St Bridget survives, though it is no longer in use. Such holy wells, typically associated with early Christian sites, were focal points for local devotion and pattern days, and the presence of one here reinforces the likelihood that this ground has been considered significant for far longer than the eighteenth-century stonework alone would suggest.