Church, Raheenadeeragh, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
What survives of this medieval church in County Kildare is, in places, barely more than a grassed-over line in the ground. The chancel walls have sunk to their lower courses, the west gable is all but gone, and a window in the south wall of the nave has been largely robbed out, its stones carted off at some point for use elsewhere. Yet enough remains upstanding, propped by a series of substantial external buttresses, to give a clear sense of what once stood here. A fragment of a medieval font still lies in the surrounding graveyard, a quiet reminder that this was a functioning place of worship for centuries.
The church was dedicated to St. Fintan and was also known by the name "Fassagh Rebane". Around 1219, Archbishop de Loundres granted it to St. Mary's Abbey in Dublin, drawing this rural Kildare parish into the orbit of one of medieval Ireland's most powerful monastic institutions. The building itself is a rectangular nave and chancel plan, constructed from very roughly coursed, angular limestone masonry. The walls vary considerably in thickness, the north wall running to 1.15 metres compared with 0.8 metres on the south, and notably the chancel walls are not bonded to the nave, suggesting the two sections may have been built at different times. By 1630, when Archbishop Bulkeley conducted his Visitation of Dublin, the church was already recorded as ruinous. The opposing doorways near the west ends of both the north and south walls of the nave, each roughly 1.2 metres wide, would have allowed processions or separate entry for different members of the congregation, a common arrangement in medieval Irish parish churches.