Tulla Church (in ruins), Tulla, Co. Clare

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Churches & Chapels

Tulla Church (in ruins), Tulla, Co. Clare

On the low hillock at the eastern edge of Tulla village in County Clare, a roofless limestone church sits within a graveyard that is itself contained within an older ecclesiastical enclosure, and beside that, the site of a castle.

The arrangement is quietly extraordinary: centuries of ecclesiastical, defensive, and funerary activity compressed into a small elevated space, with views across rolling pasture in every direction. The church itself was built in 1702, used for just over a century, and abandoned in 1816, yet its walls remain largely intact, their full height preserved in dressed random rubble limestone. What draws the eye on a close inspection is a small detail on one of the southwest quoins, the dressed corner stones that give a building its structural rigidity: a cherub etched into the stone, believed to be a mason's mark, personal and easy to miss.

The building is rectangular in plan, roughly fifteen and a half metres east to west, with three tall round-headed windows piercing the south wall and a shallow projecting chancel at the east end, re-roofed in natural slate during conservation works carried out around 2007. Inside, the nave floor is grassed over and level, with a handful of headstones and worn flat graveslabs near the chancel. A cut limestone plinth, still bearing the remnants of a wrought-iron rail on cast-iron piers, once divided the nave from the chancel. The chancel itself retains its brick barrel-vaulted roof and is flanked by two elaborate wall plaques: one dedicated to Browne, dated 1717, and another to O'Callaghan, dated 1824. On the north wall of the nave, an elaborate memorial plaque erected by John Westropp in 1764 is dedicated to Morony, though a fragment of its cornice has broken away and now rests among other architectural fragments at the eastern side of the graveyard. Excavations carried out under licence also revealed evidence of a vault entrance near the chancel, suggesting that the ground beneath the building holds further, undisturbed history. Window sills throughout are formed from Liscannor slate, the locally quarried flagstone long used across Clare for floors, roofs, and paving.

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