Church, Templederry, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
At Templederry in County Tipperary, a church site sits on a natural rise in gently rolling terrain, carrying centuries of ecclesiastical history while showing almost none of it.
The building that stands there today dates only from 1828, and the graveyard surrounding it contains no headstones earlier than the eighteenth century, no salvaged stonework, no carved fragments from whatever came before. The earlier church has vanished so completely that there is no visible trace of it at ground level.
The documentary record, however, reaches back considerably further. The Royal Visitation of 1615 found the building already in poor condition, recording it as a "church and chancell down", meaning both the nave and the chancel had collapsed or fallen into ruin. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, the description had simplified to "an old Church", a phrase that suggests the site was recognised more as a marker on the landscape than as a functioning place of worship. The Protestant church erected in 1828 occupies the centre of a rectangular graveyard, the walls of which have been substantially rebuilt along the northern and eastern sides and repointed elsewhere. Whatever physical continuity might once have connected the earlier structure to this later one has been thoroughly obscured by successive phases of repair and reconstruction.
What makes the place quietly unusual is precisely this layering of erasure. A site documented as ruinous in 1615, recorded again as merely "old" forty years later, and then rebuilt in the nineteenth century has passed through so many acts of replacement that the archaeology is now almost entirely legible through written sources alone rather than through stone or soil. The rise on which it sits may be the oldest thing there.