Church, Kilmoyemoge, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Churches & Chapels
In a field of pasture on the north side of the Dawn river valley in County Waterford, there is almost nothing to see. No standing walls, no visible stone work, no obvious indication that anything of significance ever took place here. Yet beneath or within that ordinary-looking ground lies the site of an early medieval church, its enclosure now erased at ground level, known only because a lane cut through it and, in doing so, turned up a bullaun stone, a hollowed boulder of the kind associated with early Christian sites across Ireland, where the basin was used for grinding, for collecting water, or in practices whose precise meaning has long since blurred into folk memory. By 1840, the Ordnance Survey was already recording the place simply as "Old Grave Yard", a label that captures how thoroughly the ecclesiastical identity of the site had faded from common knowledge.
The scholar John O'Donovan, working around 1840, identified this as the church of St Dimóg, also known as St Dima, a figure obscure enough that the dedication itself required scholarly reconstruction rather than living tradition. A later study noted that the site had once been defined by an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of curving boundary, often a bank and ditch, that marked out sacred space in early Irish Christianity and frequently predates the church buildings associated with it. The bullaun stone that emerged when a north-south lane was cut through that enclosure measured roughly half a metre by just over a third of a metre, with a single shallow basin about twenty-three centimetres across. It is no longer at the site itself but has been removed to a nearby house. To the south of the church ground, a barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, sits adjacent, a reminder that sacred and funerary use of this river valley shelf predates the Christian period entirely.

