Church, Tinhalla, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Churches & Chapels
Somewhere in a pasture near the River Suir in County Waterford, a church has vanished so completely that nothing of it remains above ground. The field where it once stood is still called the Church Field, a name that has outlasted every stone of the building itself. A portion of wall apparently held on until around 1950, remembered by local people who were alive to see it, but that too is gone now, leaving only grass and the faint persistence of a place-name.
The church at Tinhalla sat at the southern edge of the Suir floodplain, on a north-facing slope about 350 metres from the river. Beyond its location and its name, the historical record is thin. What survives in a more tangible sense is a baptismal font, a circular sandstone basin roughly 84 centimetres in diameter and 36 centimetres tall, with a flat-bottomed interior hollow about 60 centimetres across and 20 centimetres deep. Fonts of this kind were used for the ritual of baptism, typically placed near the entrance of a church so that the newly baptised could be received into the building as members of the faith. This one was removed from the site at some point and now sits at a private house in Crehanagh South, about two kilometres to the west-southwest. The Tinhalla area falls within the historical territory of the Decies, the ancient Gaelic kingdom of west Waterford documented by the Waterford-born scholar and priest Revd Patrick Power in his study of local placenames, published in its second edition in 1952.