Church, Pallas (Connello Upper By.), Co. Limerick
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Churches & Chapels
One of the more telling details at this ruined church near Pallas in County Limerick is a doorway that has quietly disappeared into the ground.
On the south wall, the outside ground level has risen by roughly one and a half metres above the interior floor over the centuries, so that what was once a functioning entrance now sits just barely above the earth outside, with only the topmost jamb-stone and a single arch-stone of its late-medieval surround still visible. The building kept accumulating history around and above itself, while the evidence of its earlier phases slowly sank from view.
The roofless shell here is the former parish church of Kilmeedy, a rectangular structure measuring fifteen metres east to west and just over six metres north to south, built of random-coursed sandstone rubble with well-cut quoins at the corners. The core of the building appears to be late-medieval, though a Protestant church was recorded as being erected on the site in 1665; this is now understood to represent a renovation of the existing structure rather than a new build, with the west doorway, the north wall windows, and alterations to existing openings all likely inserted at that time. Samuel Lewis noted in the 1830s that the church was about to be rebuilt, but that plan apparently came to nothing. By 1841 the Ordnance Survey six-inch map already recorded it as ruinous, and in 1848 a gabled tomb for William de Massy was constructed against the east wall inside, a division wall of roughly the same date splitting the interior just east of centre. The liturgical details that survive from the earlier building are worth noting: a piscina, the shallow stone basin near the altar where a priest would rinse the chalice during Mass, sits near the east end of the south wall, with a pointed arch surround, rebated and chamfered jambs, and a rosette-shaped drain at its centre, though the drain is damaged. A small aumbry, a recessed wall cupboard used for storing vessels or the reserved sacrament, survives at the south end of the east wall.
The church sits to the north-east of centre within a graveyard that continues in active use, dense with nineteenth and twentieth century burial plots inside the roofless walls themselves. The walls mostly stand to their full height but are heavily draped in ivy, which both preserves and obscures the stonework. Visitors interested in the architectural details, particularly the surviving medieval fragments near the south wall doorway, will need to look carefully at ground level on the exterior west side of that opening, where the remnants of the late-medieval surround are easy to overlook.