Clashacrow Church (in ruins), Clashacrow, Co. Kilkenny

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Clashacrow Church (in ruins), Clashacrow, Co. Kilkenny

What makes this ruined church in Co. Kilkenny quietly odd is not the church itself but what was attached to it: a three-storey residential tower, built onto the west end as though someone decided a place of worship needed a spare bedroom.

The whole complex sits on flat ground near the east bank of the River Arigna, inside the demesne of Wellbrook House, and is heavily draped in ivy. It occupies the north-west corner of an irregular graveyard, and about 190 metres to the north-east there is a dovecote, which gives the ensemble a slightly eccentric, accumulated quality, as if each generation added something without much consultation with the last.

The church itself is dedicated to St Kieran of Ossory, according to William Carrigan's 1905 history of the diocese. Of the original fabric, only the east gable and south wall survive intact; the north wall is an entirely modern rebuild. The south wall retains some of its early character: a blocked-up entrance, a partially surviving window embrasure with fine diagonal tooling on its internal surround, and a small round-headed piscina, a shallow liturgical basin set into the wall for rinsing sacred vessels, at its east end. At some point in the eighteenth or nineteenth century the church was remodelled as a private mortuary chapel, and a later window was inserted into the original east gable embrasure. The tower attached to the west end is entered through a pointed doorway with punch tooling, which opens into a small lobby and then a ground-floor chamber with recesses in the west wall. A mural stair, built within the thickness of the wall, rises to a first floor that retains its vaulted roof, a fireplace, and a wall cupboard. Off this floor, a small chamber within the east wall was known locally, as the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 recorded, as 'the Bed', on the supposition that it had once served as a hermit's cell. The second floor, according to Carrigan, had been largely thrown down to the level of the stone vault beneath it by his time of writing.

The site lies within private demesne land, so access is not straightforward, but the piscina, the diagonal-tooled stonework, and the peculiar domestic tower appended to what was once a place of worship make it a genuinely layered place for anyone with reason to visit.

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