Church, Timogue, Co. Laois

' Someone painting a rural church paused to wonder, with genuine uncertainty, how the war would end, and left the question sealed in glass. That inscription alone would make this place worth noticing. But the building around it is equally unusual: the arrangement of its pulpit and reading desks, set behind and above the Holy Communion table, is considered the only surviving example of its kind in Ireland. A similar layout once existed in the church of St. George in Dublin. The positioning, with the high pulpit elevated above the altar rather than to the side of it, was a deliberate theological statement; it implied that the preaching of the word took precedence over the sacrament.

The site has a considerably longer history beneath that Protestant interior. The place-name appears in papal records as early as 1204, listed as 'Techmoedoch' among the possessions confirmed to Herluin, bishop of Leighlin. By 1302 it was valued at five marks a year under the name 'Kylsondale'. The founding of the original church is disputed; one tradition associates it with St. Maodhóg, patron of Ferns in County Wexford, while another, recorded in the nineteenth century by Daniel O'Byrne of Timahoe, links it to St. Mochua, a Leinster saint whose feast day falls on 24 December, described in earlier sources as a son of Lonan, of the race of Eochaidh Finnfuathairt. O'Byrne's account adds a particular turn: he wrote that Sir Walter Whelan, a Catholic resident of Timogue Castle just 75 metres to the south-west, built a chapel on the site of that ancient church, which subsequently passed through various hands and became the present Church of Ireland building. By 1585 to 1587 the church had been described as 'ruinated but the lande not waste', though a diocesan visitation in 1615 found the chancel and church repaired. A floor memorial of 1715 marks the burial vault of Sir Daniel Byrne of Timogue Castle, and a wall tablet of 1764 commemorates Gerald Fitzgerald of Morett Castle and his only son, noting that Gerald of Morett was 'murthered and his castle burnt there: in the reign of Queen Elizabeth'. The late medieval limestone octagonal font in the north-west corner of the nave is among the older objects to survive within the building.

The church is still used for worship. Its west gable retains a pointed cut-stone doorway with chamfered jambs dating from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and a bellcote sits at the apex above it, topped by a weather vane carrying the date 1736. That vane, made around 1964 during a restoration, replaced an earlier one in the form of a dragon's head with the date held in its open mouth. The wooden pews are believed to date from around the same period as the original vane. Several of the eighteenth-century sash windows retain their original glazing, and it is in one of these that W Dobbin's wartime question survives, still unanswered by the glass itself.