Church, Blanchvillespark, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
In the graveyard at Blanchvillespark, County Kilkenny, lies a church that has not stood for centuries.
What remains of it is not a ruin in the conventional sense, with ragged gables or ivy-covered walls, but simply the ghost of a floor plan pressed into the ground. The walls, according to those who have looked for them, are gone entirely, leaving only foundations to mark where a building once was.
The place is recorded under the local name 'the Church of the Park', and the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his substantial account of the Catholic diocese of Ossory, noted its dimensions with some precision: roughly 37 feet long and 17 and a half feet wide on the interior, which works out to approximately 11.2 by 5.3 metres. That is a modest footprint, consistent with many small medieval parish churches found across Leinster. Carrigan observed that all the walls had collapsed, speculating that this may have happened centuries before his own time, leaving only the foundations traceable. The graveyard in which these remains sit has continued in use independently of the church itself, as often happened in rural Ireland, where a burial ground could outlast its associated building by generations.