(Site of) Church, Brosna, Co. Kerry
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Churches & Chapels
In the graveyard at the centre of Brosna village in County Kerry, the medieval church that once stood here has long since vanished above ground.
Yet the site retains quiet physical traces: a fragment of window embrasure tucked behind a headstone at the northwestern corner, its opening blocked up on the exterior, and a gable wall at the southwestern corner, partially swallowed by ivy, that rises to over three metres when viewed from outside the boundary. An inwardly splayed window embrasure is a tapered opening in a wall, wider on the inside than the outside, typical of medieval ecclesiastical construction. These two remnants belong to structures separate from the main church, whose fabric has left no visible trace at all.
The church's documentary history reaches back to 1302, when a place recorded as 'Kaiterbristelan', identified as Caher Breslayn, was valued at 20 shillings per annum in a papal taxation of the diocese of Ardfert. By 1398, a papal letter acknowledged one John Flemyng as perpetual vicar, granting him dispensation on account of his birth outside of marriage, so that he could hold a benefice with cure of souls. A further papal letter of 1402 records a complicated exchange of rectories involving William Macgildroma, an Augustinian canon of Killagh monastery, who wished to swap the rectory of Cathairbreslayn for the closer and more financially rewarding rectory of Kilmaniheen West. The parish's patron saint was St Moling Luachra, said to have been a native of the Sliabh Luachra uplands nearby, and a holy well bearing his name survives to the southeast of the graveyard. By 1841, when the Ordnance Survey passed through, the church had already entirely disappeared; their surveyors noted the site but recorded that no part of it remained.
The graveyard sits immediately south of the village square, adjacent to the later St Moling's Roman Catholic Church, which inherited the dedication of its long-vanished predecessor. The window embrasure near the Walsh grave plot is partially obscured by a small heart-shaped headstone, and the ivy-covered gable wall to the southwest rewards a closer look from outside the boundary, where its full height becomes apparent.
