Church (in ruins), Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Churches & Chapels
In a roughly square graveyard just north of a public road in Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny, there is a site where two churches once stood in succession, and now neither does.
What remains is an overgrown enclosure, the scrub long since reclaiming whatever stonework or order was left behind after the second building came down in 1960.
The layering here is worth pausing over. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that the old Catholic parish church originally occupied this ground, and was most likely cleared away when a Church of Ireland building was erected on the same spot by Colonel John Shee in 1795. That replacement church stood for a century and a half before it too was demolished. The result is a site that has quietly shed two distinct phases of religious use, leaving only the graveyard itself as continuous evidence of the place's long function. Colonel Shee's decision to build on an existing sacred site was not unusual for the period; such appropriations, whether deliberate or simply practical, were common in post-Reformation Ireland, and they tend to compress centuries of different communities and denominations into a single modest footprint.
The graveyard still sits beside the road, and the interior is heavily overgrown with scrub. There is no standing structure left to read, but the roughly square boundary holds the outline of a place that has been, in turn, Catholic, Protestant, and finally neither.