Church, Kilnasoolagh, Co. Clare

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Church, Kilnasoolagh, Co. Clare

Kilnasoolagh, a townland near Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare, takes its name from the Irish Cill na Súlaigh, generally understood to refer to an early ecclesiastical foundation, the "church of the willows" or something close to it depending on the interpretation.

That a place retains such a name at all is often the most durable evidence that a church once mattered here, long after the physical structure has crumbled or been absorbed into later building.

The site belongs to a scattered but well-attested pattern of early medieval churches across County Clare, many of them associated with local saints or monastic communities whose written records are fragmentary at best. Kilnasoolagh later became connected with the Neylon and O'Brien families, and the Church of Ireland parish church that stands in the area today, dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occupies ground with a much longer history of Christian use. Graveyards in Ireland frequently outlast the churches they surrounded, and older burial grounds on such sites can contain carved stones, fragments of medieval masonry, or grave slabs that hint at what came before the more recent stonework.

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