Church, Oldtown, Co. Kilkenny

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Oldtown, Co. Kilkenny

In the townland of Oldtown in Co. Kilkenny, a rectangular building roughly fifteen metres long and five metres wide sits in a hollow, tucked below the level of a public road.

It does not announce itself. It cannot be seen from the ground at all. What aerial imagery reveals, and what maps stretching back to 1839 quietly confirm, is the ghost of a Catholic chapel, a building that was already old enough to be replaced by 1813, and which has since sunk so completely into the landscape that it exists now only as a shape on paper and a shadow from above.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that the old chapel of Glenmore was built probably around 1700 and occupied a deep hollow directly beneath the public road, positioned close to the Curate's house. It was superseded by a new chapel, whose entrance door carried an inscribed slab recording the year 1813, the names of the parishioners who funded it, and the two priests then serving the parish, Rev. John Fitzpatric as Parish Priest and Rev. William Grant as Coadjutor. That replacement building itself appears to have been constructed elsewhere, because neither the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839 nor the twenty-five inch map of 1899 marks any church within the Glenmore townland itself. Instead, both those maps, along with a 1948 revision, show two buildings in the neighbouring townland of Oldtown, around eighty metres south of the road, the southernmost one sitting in a hollow that corresponds precisely with Carrigan's description. A second structure, positioned about seventeen metres to the north-north-east, is thought to be the Curate's house he mentioned. The cartographic evidence places these firmly, even if the ground offers nothing to confirm them.

What makes this site quietly peculiar is the completeness of its disappearance. Buildings that fall out of use typically leave something visible, a roofless shell, a scatter of dressed stone, a tell-tale rise in the ground. Here, the hollow that once sheltered a congregation has apparently swallowed all trace of the structure it contained. Satellite imagery taken in April 2021 shows no surface remains whatsoever. The chapel exists, for now, only in Carrigan's prose, in the contour lines of nineteenth-century maps, and in the aerial outline of a rectangular footprint that the ground refuses to give up.

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