Church, Templemichael, Co. Limerick

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Church, Templemichael, Co. Limerick

Just east of the village of Caherconlish in County Limerick, a low grassy mound beside a newly-built house is about as unassuming as a historic site can get.

There are no standing walls, no interpretive panels, and no obvious reason to stop. What survives of Teampall Mhíchíl is a sub-oval earthwork, roughly seventeen metres east to west, defined by a scarped edge, that slight but deliberate step in the ground where an enclosure was once bounded. Beneath the grass, the wall footings that do remain form no coherent pattern. A stone decorated with an animal has been recorded from the site, though its current whereabouts are not noted in the sources.

The historical record, while fragmentary, is quietly eventful. By 1666, in the aftermath of the Cromwellian land settlements, the property known as Temple Mighill in the barony of Clanwilliam was granted to a John Friend under the Act of Settlement, as recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Westropp in the early twentieth century. Local tradition, gathered by Ordnance Survey workers in 1840, held that the site had once been a friary, surrounded by a spacious graveyard. That tradition gained some credibility in 1819, when cultivation of the field turned up human bones and the remains of coffins. The 1840 Name Books describe the ruins as then level with the ground and covered with grass, planted around with fir trees. A separate account, from Lynch writing in 1896, preserves the tradition that some of General Ginkel's soldiers were buried here. Ginkel commanded Williamite forces during the Siege of Limerick in 1691, making this a plausible, if unverified, detail from the turbulent close of the Jacobite War in Ireland.

The site sits immediately northeast of a road on a gentle northwest-facing slope, with open views to the west, north, and east. Archaeological monitoring carried out under licence in the early 2000s, when groundworks were dug for the adjacent house, revealed nothing of archaeological significance beneath the surface, so what the mound conceals remains effectively unknown. The monument is heavily obscured by rough grass and easy to miss entirely. The 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the enclosure clearly enough, and comparing that sheet to the present landscape is probably the most rewarding exercise available to anyone who makes the short detour from Caherconlish.

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