Loughlohery Church (in ruins), Loughlohery, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
The detail that catches the eye at this ruined church near Loughlohery is not the collapsed north wall or the heaps of sorted rubble inside, but a small limestone corbel projecting from the interior face of the east gable.
Carefully cut, roughly the width of a forearm, it sits about eighty centimetres above the internal floor level and just north of the east window. The Office of Public Works has suggested it once served as a statue support, which would make it a quiet indicator of how the interior was furnished and used before the building fell into ruin. It is an easy detail to miss, but it rewards a slow look.
The church itself is a simple, undivided structure, meaning it has no chancel arch or internal division of the kind common in medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings. It measures just over fourteen metres east to west and about seven and a half metres north to south, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble. The east gable is the most complete element still standing, rising to around five and a half metres and retaining a round-headed single-light window at its centre. The upper south jamb of that window carries chequerboard decoration, a carved pattern of alternating raised and recessed squares that gives the otherwise plain fabric an unexpected flourish. The north wall has largely collapsed, with only its lower courses surviving across much of its length, and a grassed-over vault of later construction has been added against the west gable. Some consolidation and cleaning has been carried out in recent years, and several of the angles have been rebuilt. The church sits roughly at the centre of a fairly rectangular graveyard on a gentle west-facing slope of a ridge, set within rolling pasture.
Visitors approaching the site should look carefully along the east gable once inside, where the corbel and the decorated window jamb are both visible at close range. The chequerboard carving on the south jamb is on the upper portion and becomes clearer as the eye adjusts to the stonework. The surviving coping stone at the north-east angle, still in place about two and a half metres above the ground, gives a sense of how the gable would once have been finished.