Leper Hospital, Windmill, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Healthcare
A townland called Knocksaintlour, translating as 'Hill of Saint of the Lepers', is about as unambiguous a place-name as medieval Ireland offers.
The saint in question is Lazarus, patron of lepers, and the townland sits just outside Cashel in County Tipperary, where the earthwork remains of a medieval hospital quietly moulder in improved pasture, largely unnoticed on an east-facing slope with the Rock of Cashel visible to the north.
Around 1230, Sir David Latimer, Seneschal of Cashel, founded a hospital here for lepers and the infirm, dedicating it to St Nicholas. The institution quickly attracted ecclesiastical support: Mairin O'Brien, Archbishop of Cashel between 1224 and 1237, made a regular grant to it. Later, the hospital was placed under the care of the Cistercian monks of Hore Abbey, itself founded in 1272 and still a prominent ruin near the base of the Rock. By the late nineteenth century, a visitor named Long recorded that the remains of a Gothic arch and a few masses of masonry were still visible above ground. Those masonry fragments have since largely disappeared, and what survives today is a rectangular building platform roughly 18 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, defined by low sod-covered wall foundations and earthen scarps. The walls are best preserved along the northern and eastern sides, reducing to little more than a slight rise in the ground to the south and west. A low sub-oval mound adjoins the north-east corner, and a further distinctive scarp runs across the field some seven metres to the east, hinting at a more complex layout than the main building footprint alone suggests.
The site sits in working farmland, and there is nothing signposted or formally interpreted at the location. What the ground gives up is modest: a series of low, grassy humps and scarp lines that require some patience to read. The townland name, however, does much of the interpretive work that the earthworks themselves can no longer do.