Church, Kilteery, Co. Limerick

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Church, Kilteery, Co. Limerick

A church that has effectively vanished, leaving behind only a single large stone and a few lines in old documents, occupies a curious place in the ecclesiastical record of County Limerick.

The site in the Kilteery townland was described by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the early twentieth century, as having been entirely forgotten by local people. No ruin, no graveyard boundary, no surviving wall fragment was known to mark it. What makes this particularly striking is that the church was no obscure foundation; it appears in written records spanning three centuries, yet the ground itself gave nothing away.

Westropp, drawing on his survey of Limerick's ecclesiastical remains published between 1904 and 1905, noted that Kilteery church sat on the west angle of Loghill parish. The earliest documentary reference he found was a fourteenth-century rental, dating to 1336, which recorded the place as Kailtyry, within the Manor of Leamkail. A Down Survey reference from 1657 placed it again at the western edge of the parish, and a set of Limerick terriers, a terrier being a formal written survey of church lands and properties, from 1667 held in the Public Record Office of Ireland listed a related entry as Lisrady, or Lisready Church, near Kilteery, in the barony of Connelloe. Three separate administrative documents across three centuries, and yet by the time Westropp went looking, the precise location had slipped entirely from local memory.

More recently, a large altar-shaped stone was discovered in the townland, and local tradition now associates it with the lost church site. The Limerick Diocese Heritage website holds further detail on this find. For anyone visiting the area, the townland itself is in the south of County Limerick, not far from the Shannon estuary. There is no formal access point or interpretive signage, and the site remains essentially unmarked. The altar stone is the only physical indicator, and its identification rests on local belief rather than archaeological confirmation. Anyone exploring the area would do well to check current access and land ownership before heading out.

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