Church, Kiltiernan, Co. Dublin
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Churches & Chapels
The ground outside this small medieval church in south County Dublin has been quietly rising for centuries, slowly swallowing the lower courses of the building from the outside.
The effect is a strange inversion: the interior floor level now sits noticeably higher than you might expect relative to the exterior, and what would once have been the visible base of the walls has long since disappeared beneath accumulated earth. It is a reminder that landscapes are not static, and that even solid granite buildings can be gradually consumed by their surroundings.
The church is a plain rectangular structure, measuring 10.6 metres in length and 5.5 metres in width, built from randomly coursed granite blocks, with larger stones used in the lower courses and neatly dressed quoins at the corners. The east and west gables remain standing, though the upper section of the east gable narrows slightly, forming a ledge. A round-headed window in the east wall, cut from dressed granite and set within a deep, widely splayed embrasure, retains a granite baptismal font inside it; the font is round and flat-bottomed with a funnel-shaped interior, and measures roughly 30 centimetres high and 59 centimetres across at its widest point. A lintelled doorway in the west gable is now blocked, and a pointed doorway in the south wall is only partially open. Outside the south-east corner of the building, a small cross-incised granite slab lies flat, a quiet carved marker roughly 45 centimetres square. The curve in the north-east section of the boundary wall may indicate that an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, likely circular in the early medieval fashion, once preceded the present rectangular layout. The site is documented in Wakeman's late nineteenth-century surveys of 1891 and 1900, and in Turner's 1983 study.
The church sits within a walled graveyard on the summit of a south-facing slope, which gives the site an open aspect and makes the granite stonework particularly legible in good light. The stepped entrance in the north wall, 1.63 metres wide, is worth examining closely, as are the external buttresses added to stabilise the walls. The font, still in place in the east window embrasure rather than removed or lost, is an unusual survival, and the cross-incised slab at the south-east corner is easy to walk past without noticing.