Settlement deserted - medieval, Coolcashin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Settlement Sites
The fields around the old church at Coolcashin, County Kilkenny, hold the faint outline of a community that no longer exists.
Spread across a gentle east-facing slope just below a hilltop, the ground retains the compressed memory of a medieval settlement in the form of low earthworks: trackways that once connected neighbours, enclosures where animals or crops were kept, and platforms on which buildings almost certainly stood. These subtle humps and hollows are easy to overlook in rolling grassland, but they represent the remains of organised, inhabited space that was eventually abandoned and folded back into farmland.
The settlement clustered around what is still a legible medieval church and graveyard, with the earthworks running immediately to the north, east, and west of these structures. A stream traces the south-western edge of the site before joining a river roughly two hundred metres to the east, a detail that explains why anyone would have chosen this particular slope in the first place. Fresh water close at hand, a commanding position just below the hill's crest, and a modest shelter from the prevailing wind. By the mid-seventeenth century, the settlement had already declined to the point where the Down Survey parish map of 1655 to 1656 recorded only "a stump of a castle" somewhere in this vicinity. The Down Survey was a systematic mapping of Irish land carried out under William Petty following the Cromwellian conquest, and its laconic notation here suggests that even the castle, which would have been the focal point of any local authority, had long since fallen into ruin. Eighteen metres west of the graveyard's north-western corner, a holy well survives, a small sacred site of the kind that often persisted in use long after the wider community around it had dispersed.