Church, Tubbrid, Co. Kilkenny

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Tubbrid, Co. Kilkenny

What remains of this medieval church at Tubbrid sits on a broad terrace above the Nuenna river valley, its end gables still standing close to their original height while almost everything in between has been picked apart.

The doorways have been broken out, the windows cleared from their frames, and a chancel arch that was already described in 1839 as having collapsed to the level of the side walls has long since disappeared entirely. The rubble walls, built to a thickness of 1.67 metres, survive as a kind of outline, roughly 19 metres long and 6 metres wide, giving a clear enough sense of the building's proportions without offering much of its substance.

The church was associated with the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, an order of clergy who followed the Rule of St. Augustine and lived a communal life, attached here to St. John's Abbey in Kilkenny, according to William Carrigan's 1905 history of the diocese. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 recorded the central gable, which would have carried the chancel arch separating nave from chancel, as already fallen, measuring its position at thirty-eight and a half feet from the western gable. Carrigan also noted a 13th-century graveslab in the chancel, a carved medieval marker that was subsequently broken up and lost. The graveyard surrounding the ruin continued in use well into the modern era, and the Shortall family left a visible presence there. Where the OS Letters referred to a single old Shortall grave, Carrigan found many monuments to the family, though none older than the mid-18th century, suggesting either that earlier markers had not survived or that the family's attachment to the site postdated the church's active life.

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