St. Margaret's Church in Newtown, Co. Limerick, sits on open grassland just 380 metres south of the River Shannon, its walls still standing to roughly twelve feet in height despite centuries of exposure. When an Ordnance Survey correspondent described it in 1840, he noted that stillborn children alone were interred within the enclosure, a practice once common across Ireland at sites considered neither fully consecrated nor fully ordinary, where unbaptised infants could be laid to rest outside the formal parish churchyard. The detail sits quietly in his otherwise methodical survey of stonework and dimensions, easy to miss but difficult to forget.

The church takes its dedication from St. Margaret and was associated with the Hospitallers of Ainey, a preceptory of the Knights Hospitaller, the military-religious order that managed properties and hospitals across medieval Europe. In 1605, following the upheavals of the late sixteenth century, the preceptory was granted to a Thomas Browne, at which point the church was recorded as lying in "Newtown near Adare." The townland itself appears in administrative records stretching back to 1283, when the Pipe Rolls note it as "Neweton in Esclon," held by Simon Waleys and W. Lucas. A 1410 reference names the church directly, and the Annals of the Four Masters use the Irish form "bailenua" in 1502. Historian T.J. Westropp, writing in the early twentieth century, pieced these scattered references together, while Begley in 1906 observed that despite its age and evident use as a place of burial, the ruin appeared never to have served as a formal burial ground in any conventional sense.

The structure is unusually well preserved for its age. The 1840 description records walls of regularly coursed stone, about three and a half feet thick, laid with sand and lime mortar, and a fine east window with a round arch of cut limestone on the interior and a pointed two-light arrangement on the exterior, a combination that reflects transitional medieval building practice. The south doorway and several windows have lost their dressed stonework to weathering, but the shell of the building remains largely intact. It lies near Carrigogunnell, and the surrounding grassland means the approach is relatively open, though the site sits on private farmland and visitors should be mindful of that. The east window, with its dual treatment in cut limestone, is the most architecturally rewarding detail to look for once you are standing inside the walls.