Site of Church, Borris Great, Co. Laois

What remained was a heap of stones, and that heap was considered sufficient to mark the spot on a map.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1907 dutifully record the site, though what they were marking was already more memory than structure. In 1838, a surveyor working on the OS Letters noted the situation plainly: a church had existed in Borris Great, but none of it remained, and only a pile of rubble from the building indicated where it had once stood. Nearly seventy years later, in 1907, O'Hanlon and O'Leary were still describing the same scene, noting that not far from Bloomfield House lay the old church, marked by nothing more than that same heap of stones. The site has since passed beyond even that modest visibility; today there are no surface remains at all. What the church was, when it was built, and what community it served are questions the landscape no longer answers. The stones themselves are gone. About forty-five metres to the south-west, however, a holy well survives. Holy wells in Ireland are ancient water sources, often pre-Christian in origin, that became absorbed into local Catholic devotional practice; they frequently appear in close proximity to early church sites, and their persistence here, long after the church itself dissolved into the ground, is the kind of quiet archaeological accident that tells you something once mattered in a place, even if the record of what exactly has been lost.