Church, Lewistown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
Somewhere in the rolling tillage land around Lewistown in County Kildare, a church has effectively disappeared twice: once from the physical landscape, and once from the cartographic record entirely. The site sits on a gentle rise in open farmland, the kind of modest elevation that earlier communities often chose for burial and worship, and local knowledge holds that remains of the church were still visible above ground until the field was replanted in recent years. What makes the place quietly anomalous is that it never appears on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping, the series that, from the 1830s onwards, documented Irish townlands in extraordinary detail, recording everything from field boundaries to individual cottages. Its absence from those maps suggests the church had already vanished, or been reduced to near-nothing, before surveyors ever passed through, leaving local memory as the only thread connecting the site to its past.