Church, Naas, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
On the east side of North Main Street in Naas, a medieval church dedicated to St. David sits within what may be an early graveyard, its fabric quietly carrying eight centuries of accumulated history. What makes it particularly unusual is its long association with the Knights Hospitaller, the military-religious order founded during the Crusades to care for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem. By 1212, when the church appears in written record for the first time, it was already listed among their possessions, and it would remain Hospitaller property throughout the Middle Ages.
The building itself is a composite structure, its different phases legible in the stonework. The 13th-century nave and south aisle were constructed from roughly coursed limestone, with quoins and jambs of granite and tufa, and a chancel was added slightly later, connected to the nave by a pointed chancel arch. A chantry, in the medieval sense, was a foundation endowed to pay priests to sing masses for the souls of benefactors, and by 1606 an inquisition recorded that this church contained three of them, whose clergy had formed a corporate body with substantial collective wealth. The south aisle has largely disappeared, its wall reduced to footings, and the four modern windows cut into the south wall of the nave sit within blocked-up pointed arches that once opened onto that vanished space. A tower was added to the southwest end of the nave in 1781, giving the building its present profile. The interior retains two medieval fonts, one at the west end of the nave and a second circular example against the north wall, alongside five 17th-century memorial stones, two armorial plaques, and a 17th-century tomb built against the exterior wall. The chancel is lit by a triple-lancet window in the northeast gable, three narrow arched openings grouped together, a form common in early Gothic ecclesiastical architecture.