Site of Kilcolmanbara Church, Poulnaskagh, Co. Clare
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Churches & Chapels
In a reedy patch of pasture at the western end of the Kilcorney Valley in County Clare, a low mound roughly a metre high is just about all that remains of what local tradition held to be the oldest church in the valley.
The surrounding hills close in on all sides, and the site sits on level ground that gives nothing away. Without the faint subrectangular outline of the cairn, measuring approximately sixteen metres by eight, there would be little reason to pause here at all.
The place carries the name of St Colman Baire, a figure associated not only with this church but with a cashel located about 280 metres to the north-north-west. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, sometimes enclosing a dwelling or ecclesiastical settlement, and tradition held that the saint actually lived within that structure. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, the church had already vanished from the landscape entirely, appearing on the six-inch map only as a named site rather than a standing building. The 1897 twenty-five-inch plan confirmed the same, marking a broken rectangular outline of roughly 11.8 metres by 7.5 metres to indicate the footprint of a structure long since levelled. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century and later edited by Comber in 1997, recorded the local belief that this was the valley's earliest Christian foundation, dedicated to the saint whose name the place still carries in variant spellings across different maps and sources.
What a visitor finds today is the cairn itself, covered in reeds and easy to overlook in wet conditions. The nearby cashel associated with St Colman Baire lies a short distance to the north-north-west and offers a more legible sense of the early medieval presence in this part of Clare, the two sites together sketching a landscape that was, at some point, considered significant enough to remember even after every wall had gone.