Church, Rathjordan, Co. Limerick
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Churches & Chapels
What remains of the old parish church at Rathjordan is, by any measure, not much to look at.
The building has been so thoroughly erased that by 1840, when the Ordnance Survey fieldworkers passed through, they noted that scarcely a stone of the foundation could be traced. Today, the site announces itself only as a slightly raised area of stony ground on the northern side of a graveyard now largely swallowed by vegetation. It is the kind of place that rewards patience and a certain tolerance for ambiguity.
The church served as the parish church of Rathjordan, and its documentary trail, pieced together by antiquarian Thomas Westropp in 1904 and 1905, reaches back to at least 1302, when the settlement appeared in records associated with the Wethney and Natherlach deaneries. By 1586 it was noted in connection with Kylkyllane parish, and early seventeenth-century sources place it variously within the Owney and Caherkynlis deaneries, reflecting the shifting administrative boundaries that characterised ecclesiastical Munster across the medieval and early modern periods. The Ordnance Survey Name Books of 1840 described what little was then visible as a small ruin nearly level with the ground, suggesting the building had already been reduced for some considerable time before even that survey was made. Westropp also recorded the nearby holy well, known as Tober Eoin Baiste, the Well of St. John the Baptist, which lies approximately 200 metres to the west-southwest of the church site. Holy wells in Ireland were often associated with pre-Reformation parish churches, serving as sites of local devotion that persisted long after the church buildings themselves had fallen.
The graveyard containing the church site is still present, though accessing it requires picking through significant vegetation cover. The slight elevation of the church footprint within the northern portion of the graveyard is the main physical indicator of where the building once stood. The associated holy well to the west-southwest is recorded separately and may be more readily locatable on foot with an Ordnance Survey map. There are no formal visitor facilities here, and the site repays a quiet, unhurried approach rather than any expectation of dramatic visible remains.