Tankardstown Church (in ruins), Tankardstown, Co. Laois

The ruined church that still stands here, 140 metres west of the River Barrow in gently rolling countryside, was dedicated to St Thomas the Martyr, the same Thomas Becket whose feast falls on 29 December. That shared dedication was no coincidence. The church was founded under the authority of the Augustinian canons of St Thomas' Abbey in Dublin, established in 1177, and the two were bound together through patronage and ecclesiastical administration for centuries. Two castle sites bracket the church ruins, one roughly 165 metres to the north-north-west and another about 500 metres to the south; according to a nineteenth-century account of Queen's County, both were positioned to command a crossing of the River Barrow, which suggests the whole cluster of church, wells, and fortifications once formed a coherent Anglo-Norman frontier settlement.

The grant that formalised this arrangement dates to around 1200, when Osbert, the son of Tankard, conveyed the church of St Thomas on the western side of the Barrow to the Dublin canons, along with its tithes, associated townlands, and commonage of pasture for the officiating chaplain. The grant had already been sanctioned by William Piro, bishop of Glendalough, who held that see between 1192 and 1212. Osbert's son later confirmed the arrangement. By 1533, when Archbishop John Alen compiled his register of churches in the dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough across ten deaneries, the church appeared as the 'Ecclesia de Ville Tankardi, alias Tankardestown', firmly in the Deanery of Athy. Its rectory was valued in 1540 at a modest 30 shillings, curate's stipend aside. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the property passed through several hands: in 1569 Queen Elizabeth granted a 21-year lease to Thomas Stukeley, and in 1571 a further grant conveyed the lands to Peter or Pierce Hovyndene, to be held in tail male, with an obligation to maintain two English horsemen. By 1615, a royal visitation recorded the building simply as 'Church ruined', its cure of souls served by a Nicholas Walker of Athy.

What survives today is a nave and chancel church, roughly 12.5 metres long and 6.1 metres wide, built from roughly coursed limestone blocks. Traces of a segmental chancel arch, the decorative curve separating the nave from the chancel, are still visible, as is evidence of a doorway at the western end of the south wall and a window in the east gable. The church sits within a graveyard, with St Thomas's Well lying just 90 metres to the north, a quiet arrangement of medieval devotional geography that the surrounding fields have done little to disturb.