Church, Templebodan, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
Within a graveyard in County Cork, there is a parish church that has not been visible for a very long time.
No stone, no outline, no earthwork marks where Templebodan once stood. The ground simply continues, indifferent to what lies beneath or what once rose above it. By 1936, the Ordnance Survey was already reduced to labelling the spot "site of", which is the cartographic equivalent of a shrug.
The church had already fallen into ruin by the seventeenth century, according to Brady's 1863 ecclesiastical record. The name Templebodan follows a pattern common across Ireland, where "Teampall" denotes a church, often an early medieval foundation, combined with a personal or saint's name. Whatever community gathered here, whatever dedications or burials defined this place across the medieval centuries, the physical structure did not survive into the modern period. Brady noted it, the mapmakers noted its absence, and since then the graveyard has continued in use around a church that no longer has any surface trace at all.