Site of Kilpatrick Church, Kilpatrick, Co. Tipperary

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Kilpatrick Church, Kilpatrick, Co. Tipperary

A graveyard in County Tipperary marks a site where a church once stood, yet today the ground keeps almost no visible trace of it.

The surface remains have vanished entirely, leaving only the turf and the headstones of those buried there. It is a curious kind of erasure, where the building that gave the place its name and its purpose has been absorbed back into the low rise of land on which it sat, the surrounding countryside rolling away with clear views in every direction.

The church did not disappear all at once. When a surveyor named Curry recorded his observations in the Ordnance Survey letters, later compiled and published by O'Flanagan in 1930, enough was still standing to take measurements from. At that point the east gable and roughly nine metres of the north wall remained attached to it. The north wall was nearly a metre thick and stood about two and a half metres high, built from quarried red grit stone bonded with lime and mortar, a common early building technique in which lime was burned and mixed with sand and water to form a durable cement. A crack ran through the east gable from ground to top, and this fracture had, as Curry put it, effectively swallowed the east window, leaving only two stones of its southern side visible on the exterior. From those stones it could be determined that the window was made of chiselled limestone. By 1892, when White wrote about the church, he noted flagstone construction and a single cut stone surviving at the window opening, suggesting it had always been modest in scale. The west gable had already gone entirely by Curry's time, so the full length of the building could not be established, though the traceable foundation of the south wall indicated an interior width of about seven and a half metres. What had been a small, plainly built rural church was already well into its slow disappearance, each generation of observers recording a little less than the last.

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