Church, Springfield, Co. Limerick
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Churches & Chapels
What remains of this church in Springfield is almost entirely graveyard now.
The burial plots have quietly swallowed the nave, and the congregation of headstones has long since outnumbered any congregation that gathered inside. Only the east gable survives to any meaningful height, roughly 7.8 metres wide and cloaked in ivy, with a short stub of the south wall, less than a metre long, returning from its base. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, the six-inch map still showed a recognisable rectangular structure, approximately twenty metres in length on its east-west axis, and labelled it plainly as a ruin even then. That the building survived as a ruin into the mid-nineteenth century and has since been reduced to a single wall speaks to a slow, unhurried process of erasure.
The gable is not entirely plain, however. Set into its centre is a window with a double ogee-headed light, a late medieval form in which the top of each opening curves in a gentle S-shape, giving the stonework a modest decorative quality that sits at odds with the rough coursing of the limestone blocks around it. The mullion that would have divided the two lights is gone, but the splayed embrasure, the angled recess that widens the opening inward to admit more light, is still covered by a segmental arch, and its inner edges retain dressed limestone blocks. The church was formerly known as that of Gort na Tiobraid, a place name meaning something close to the field of the well. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded it in 1904 to 1905, and the local historian Spellissy, writing in 1989, suggested it may have served as a chapel-of-ease, a secondary church built to spare parishioners a long journey to the main place of worship, and attributed its construction to the Fitzgeralds, the powerful Anglo-Norman family with a strong presence across Munster.
The surviving gable stands near the north-east corner of the graveyard, which is the most useful landmark for anyone approaching the site. The church fabric is built of roughly coursed limestone, common enough in the region, but the dressed stonework around the window embrasure rewards a closer look, particularly in low, raking light that picks out the cut edges. The missing mullion leaves the window opening reading as a single void, so the ogee profiles are best appreciated by examining the surviving jambs on either side. The graveyard remains in use, and the ruin sits within that active space rather than apart from it.