Church, Ticknevin, Co. Kildare

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Church, Ticknevin, Co. Kildare

Beside a road in Ticknevin, Co. Kildare, a small ruined church stands in a working graveyard, its western gable wall entirely gone, leaving the structure open to the sky at one end. What survives is modest but legible: a rectangular building roughly 9.4 metres long and 7.3 metres wide, its walls about a metre thick and built from uncoursed rubble limestone with undressed quoins, the rough corner stones that give a wall its structural integrity without any formal cutting or shaping. The ruin is poorly preserved, yet enough remains to read the building's original layout with some confidence.

The architectural details that do survive are quietly informative. The north wall contains a doorway with a round, segmented arch and the remains of a partially robbed-out window, its stone pilfered at some point for use elsewhere, as was commonplace in rural Ireland where dressed stone was a resource too valuable to leave idle. The east gable wall retains a window with a flat segmented arch, a feature more typical of later medieval construction. One detail in particular is worth pausing over: a piece of limestone bearing late-medieval hammer-dressing, the distinctive tooling pattern left by a broad-faced hammer on worked stone, has been lifted from the church fabric and reused as a grave marker somewhere within the same graveyard. The building has, in a sense, been cannibalised by the community it once served, its stones pressed into new duties among the very dead it would once have ministered to.

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Pete F
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