Everardsgrange Church (in ruins), Everardsgrange, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
A small ruined church in County Tipperary, draped heavily in ivy and surrounded by gravestones ranging in date from the eighteenth century to as recently as 1989, raises a question that has never been fully resolved: what, exactly, was built at its eastern end?
The Ordnance Survey letters of the 1840s, compiled by O'Flanagan, described a rubble structure beyond the east gable as a chancel, and noted a quadrangular doorway in the gable itself, roughly 1.45 metres high and 0.9 metres wide, which was already damaged by the time it was recorded. Yet the doorway, if it ever existed in the form described, is no longer visible, and the masonry in that area shows signs of later patching. The rubble remains to the east of the gable are more plausibly the walls of a burial vault or enclosed plot than a liturgical chancel, and the ivy covering the exterior has made it difficult to say with certainty either way.
The site sits on gently sloping ground above an old graveyard in undulating pasture, with the outline of Cramp's Castle visible about 640 metres to the south-west. The church itself is a modest limestone rubble structure, roughly 13.8 metres long and just under 7 metres wide, aligned east to west in the conventional manner. Its walls stand to varying heights, the gables reaching around 5.5 to 6 metres. Inside, a small aumbry, a shallow niche set into a wall for storing liturgical vessels, survives near the east end of the south wall and was probably used as a piscina, a basin for rinsing chalices and other sacred objects. A single sandstone door jamb with a chamfered edge lies fallen at the base of the west gable, the last identifiable remnant of what was once a proper dressed-stone opening. The history of the place runs deeper than the standing fabric suggests. The Papal Taxation of 1291 records the Archbishop's Manor of Everard in the Deanery of Fethard, and before that this was termon land, ground held in the protection of a church, associated with a monastery linked to St Malog, the patron saint of Fethard. The transition from monastic termon to an archiepiscopal manor marks a broader shift in how the medieval Irish church reorganised itself under continental influence.