Church, Ballyogan, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
A field in County Kilkenny carries a name that quietly signals what lies beneath it.
Known as Páirc an Teampaill, or Chapel Field, the site near Ballyogan holds no visible ruins, no stone walls, no obvious sign of human effort. The ground has simply closed over whatever was once here, though the local name for the wider area, the Holy World, suggests that people in the surrounding countryside long retained a sense that something significant had happened on this particular patch of earth.
Killanin and Duignan, writing in 1967, described the location as the site successively of an early monastery and a manorial church, that second term referring to a church built to serve a medieval lord's estate rather than a parish in the modern sense. The field appears by its Irish-derived name on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, which places it on the eastern side of a by-road running roughly north to south between the R705 and the River Barrow, roughly 880 metres south-southwest of Galmoy Castle. The most tangible survivor from the site is now some distance away: a high cross, the kind of elaborately carved free-standing stone cross associated with early Irish monasticism, was removed from Ballyogan and re-erected in the graveyard adjoining the restored Cistercian abbey church at Graiguenamanagh. Cistercian abbeys were founded by the reform movement that spread across Europe from Burgundy in the twelfth century, and Graiguenamanagh's Duiske Abbey is one of the largest examples in Ireland. The cross now stands there as a kind of displaced monument, its original context several kilometres away and invisible at ground level.
