Site of Lyrath Church, Lyrath, Co. Kilkenny

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Lyrath Church, Lyrath, Co. Kilkenny

On the grounds of what is now a hotel in County Kilkenny, a church once stood.

No walls remain, no outline of dressed stone, no visible trace above the grass. What survives is essentially a location, roughly 170 metres south-west of Lyrath House, marked on maps over three centuries as a place where a building used to be.

The church appears on the Down Survey barony map of Gowran, produced between 1655 and 1656. The Down Survey was a vast cartographic project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to catalogue Irish landholdings following the wars of the 1640s, and its maps remain among the most detailed records of mid-seventeenth century Ireland. That this church at Lyrath was considered worth marking suggests it was a functioning or at least recognisable structure at the time of the survey. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first edition six-inch maps, the site was already being recorded not as a church but as the site of one, a phrasing that cartographers used to signal a building gone or levelled. The same designation appears in the 1900 revision, meaning the structure had likely disappeared well before living memory even then, possibly cleared during improvements to the surrounding estate.

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