Kilfane Church (in ruins), Kilfane Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

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Kilfane Church (in ruins), Kilfane Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

What stops most visitors in their tracks at this ruined church in Kilfane Demesne is not the roofless nave or the worn red sandstone walls, but the colour.

Beneath the accumulated plaster of centuries, the interior preserves traces of original medieval paintwork: yellow and red borders around statue niches, and four consecration crosses, each a pattée cross in red against white, enclosed within a double-lined circle roughly half a metre across, positioned about chest height on the nave walls. These crosses were painted onto the walls at the time of the church's formal dedication, marking the twelve points anointed with holy oil during the consecration rite. That they survive at all is largely an accident of the building's later history. The church remained roofed and in active use well into the modern period, first as a Protestant place of worship and then, by the early nineteenth century, as a schoolhouse, and successive generations of replastering sealed the earlier layers rather than destroying them.

The fabric of the building dates, on architectural grounds, to the first half of the fourteenth century. It is a single, undivided nave of red sandstone rubble, just over twenty metres long and a little under five and a half metres wide, with a base-batter along the lower walls. Multiple ogee-headed doorways open through the north and south walls, each with a holy-water stoup set into a round-headed recess inside, and the east end retains a stone altar, a sedilia where priests sat during the liturgy, and a pair of tall narrow statue niches flanking the east window. An aumbry, a small wall cupboard used for storing sacred vessels, is cut into the same wall, though curiously it lacks the drainage perforation that would confirm it as a piscina. Adjoining the church at the north-east corner is a tower whose lower stages appear contemporary with the nave; a change in the masonry higher up suggests it was raised to its present height during the fifteenth century. The tower's interior is unusually well detailed, with a fireplace on the first floor, a garderobe recess, wall cupboards on the upper floors, and a double bellcote corbelled out over the parapet. Most intriguing is a set of stone hinge sockets at the top of the interior stair, the only surviving evidence of a trapdoor that once sealed access to the upper levels. By 1615, the rectory of which this church formed the centre had been incorporated into the corps of the arch-deaconry of Ossory.

Leaning against the north wall toward the east end of the nave is a stone effigy of a knight, now displayed upright. It is a striking presence in an interior that already rewards close looking, particularly for anyone prepared to let their eyes adjust and pick out what the walls have quietly held onto for the better part of seven hundred years.

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