Church, Pallas (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Pallas (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

A graveyard in the Limerick townland of Pallas holds the layered remains of not one but two vanished churches, one of them so thoroughly gone that by 1840 the Ordnance Survey could report that not a vestige of it remained.

What survives now is a low, sub-rectangular platform, roughly nine metres by twenty, with a fragment of a northwest corner wall still standing to just over a metre high. It is the ghost of a Church of Ireland building that appeared on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map but has since been demolished entirely. Beneath it, in a sense, lies something older still.

The earlier structure was known in the fifteenth century as Chapel Russell, recorded in 1418 under the Latin form "Cap. Russell spect. ad Com. Kildare," which associates it with the earldom of Kildare, and again as "Capella Russell" in 1615. The antiquarian Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, noted that the site had formerly been part of the parish of Killenalotar, and that it was only elevated to a full parish by a Bishop Elrington. Westropp also recorded that a gold fibula, a type of decorative pin or brooch used to fasten clothing, was found near the site in 1834, though its current whereabouts are not noted in the sources. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 describe the then-standing modern church as sitting on the north side of an old graveyard, on rocky ground, with no trace of the earlier building left even then.

The site sits on gently undulating terrain and is enclosed by a stone wall roughly one and a half metres high, with access from the south along a tree-lined avenue. The ovoid shape of the enclosure is itself worth noting; such roughly oval churchyard boundaries in Ireland often predate the medieval period and may indicate early Christian origins, though no surface evidence of anything earlier than the nineteenth century is visible here. The headstones visible to the south of the platform date from the mid-nineteenth century. There is nothing dramatic to see, but the layering is the point: a medieval chapel, a post-Reformation parish church, and now a grassy platform, each erasing its predecessor a little more completely.

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