Church, Templebodan, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Templebodan, Co. Cork

In the pasture at Templebodan, on a terraced ledge cut into a steep north-facing slope in County Cork, there is a church that you cannot see.

No stones protrude from the grass, no outline suggests itself underfoot, no visible feature of any kind marks the ground. The site exists, in any practical sense, only on paper.

The sole cartographic record of it appears on the 1936 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and the antiquarian Patrick Power, writing in 1923, described it as an early church site. Early church sites in Ireland typically date from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and were often modest enclosures containing a small oratory or timber church, a burial ground, and sometimes a holy well. At Templebodan, the place-name itself carries weight; "temple" in Irish townland names generally derives from the word "teampall", meaning church, and its presence here suggests the site had enough local significance to leave a linguistic trace long after any physical structure had gone. Whether through stone-robbing, centuries of ploughing, or simply the slow ingestion of the land, nothing now remains above ground.

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