Site of Church, Nurney, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Churches & Chapels
In a graveyard in Nurney, County Kildare, there is a church that exists only on paper. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, records a church in the southern sector of the burial ground, plotted with the quiet confidence of a surveyor who presumably saw something worth marking. Today, nothing remains above ground to confirm it was ever there.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey was Ireland's first large-scale systematic mapping project, and its surveyors were generally careful to distinguish between standing structures and ruins. Whatever they recorded at Nurney, it has since been entirely absorbed into the landscape, leaving the graveyard itself as the sole surviving indicator that this was once a place of organised religious activity. The burial ground is catalogued separately, and it is through that association that the vanished church is known at all. Without the map, the site would likely pass without comment.
