Mylerstown Church, Mylerstown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
At the centre of a graveyard in Mylerstown, County Kildare, a church has effectively dissolved back into the earth. What remains is not a ruin in the conventional sense, with walls rising to eye level and window apertures framing the sky, but rather a low, grassed-over spread of stone barely half a metre high in places. The outline of the building is still legible, a rectangle running east to west at roughly fourteen and a half metres long and just over five metres wide, but you would need to know what you were looking at to read it as a former place of worship rather than a slight undulation in the ground.
The site is made stranger by the way the living and the long-gone sit together without much ceremony. Two modern headstones have been placed directly on the line of the east gable wall, the end of the church where an altar would once have stood, so the buried dead of recent generations share ground with the dissolved architecture of an earlier one. Just outside the south wall, a graveslab that may date to the seventeenth century was recorded standing in position, a rare survival given how often such slabs are moved, repurposed, or lost entirely over the centuries. The aerial photograph taken in 1969 under the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured the site before further change could obscure it, providing a baseline for understanding what the stony spread actually represents.
