Church, Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny
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Churches & Chapels
In a County Kilkenny field known locally as the "churchfield", a granite pillar stands roughly a metre above the ground at the precise centre of a circular earthen enclosure.
No church is visible. The building it once enclosed has been entirely obliterated, and yet the landscape retains its memory in quiet ways, through place-names and earthworks and a single upright stone that turns out to be considerably more than it first appears.
Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted that the circular rampart at Leggetsrath East, roughly 27 metres in diameter, was still clearly traceable, even as the church within it had left no surface trace whatsoever. The field to the south, he recorded, was called the "Killeen", meaning little church, a reference to its nearness to the vanished building. A further field to the east, in the townland of Cellarstown, was known as "the Cillín", a diminutive of the Irish word for church. These names form a kind of ghost map around an absence. The granite pillar at the enclosure's centre appeared at first to be a simple standing stone, but investigations published by Prendergast in 1964 uncovered a large ringed cross-head nearby, which strongly suggests that the pillar is in fact the shaft of a high cross. A high cross is a distinctively Irish form of monumental Christian sculpture, typically carved from a single stone and surmounted by a ring joining the arms; they are usually associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites of some significance. The presence of one here, even in this fragmentary state, suggests the site carried rather more weight in its time than a modest rural church might imply.
