Religious house - Augustinian canons, Aghmacart, Co. Laois

The church tower, recorded by the antiquarian Francis Grose, was later misread as a castle on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, an error that quietly persisted in the cartographic record. What remains today is the north-east corner of the priory: the east gable and north wall, limestone-built with a base-batter, the outward-splaying foot of the wall that adds stability at ground level, incorporated into the north section of the graveyard enclosure. The east gable retains a blocked window that was once divided by a mullion into two narrow ogee-headed lights, and three window openings are still traceable in the north wall.

The site has a long and turbulent history. A monastic foundation here is attributed to 550 AD, and Aghmacart was burned in 1156 during a raid on Ossory by Muirchertach macNeill Ua Lochlainn. Shortly afterwards, around the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion, an Augustinian priory was established, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and St Tigearnach, whose feast falls on the fifth of April. MacGillapatrick, Lord of Ossory, is credited with founding it before 1168, and Henry III granted unlimited protection to the prior in 1251. The Fitzpatricks, Barons of Upper Ossory, used the priory as a family burial ground, and in 1601 a grant of the priory and its appurtenances was made to Florence Fitzpatrick. By the mid-eighteenth century, when Bishop Pococke presided over the See of Ossory between 1756 and 1765, part of the ruins had been repaired for use as a parish church. A surviving engaged pier in the east gable wall, with diagonal tooling, points to thirteenth-century construction and would originally have supported an arch for the north aisle of what appears to have been an aisled priory. The north-east corner was later converted into a mausoleum, probably in the nineteenth century, and a burial vault to the south-east may date from the seventeenth century, though it has been modernised since.