Ecclesiastical enclosure, Desart Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

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Ecclesiastical Sites

Ecclesiastical enclosure, Desart Demesne, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in County Kilkenny, the faint outline of a double circular earthwork preserves the ghost of a church that has otherwise vanished entirely from the ground.

The church, the graveyard, and a holy well once associated with it have all been levelled, and the great house that stood nearby, Desart Court, has itself since been demolished. What remains is legible only from the air: a cropmark photograph taken in July 1968 reveals a circular inner enclosure of roughly 40 metres in diameter sitting within a broader outer ring of about 80 metres, the classic double-enclosure form associated with early medieval monastic foundations in Ireland. On the ground, if you know precisely where to look, the arrangement shows itself as a gentle series of undulations in the pasture.

The church bore several names across the centuries. The Irish form, Cill Feichín, identifies it as a foundation dedicated to St Feichin, and it was also recorded as Tamplefeighane or Teampull-Feichín, the prefix teampull being a borrowing from the Latin templum used for stone churches. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted that it occupied a slight rise in the part of the Desart demesne known as the Church Field, and that the circular earthen enclosure surrounding the church and churchyard could still be traced at that time. The documentary record reaches back to 1574, when a lease under a queen's letter dated 16 April of that year granted Jasper Horsey, Esquire, the tithes of corn and hay and other profits from the parish church of Lesloynyne, alias Tamplefeighane, among others in County Kilkenny, at a rent of five pounds six shillings and eight pence. That lease itself followed an earlier arrangement dating from 1537, held by a chaplain and several Kilkenny townspeople from the abbot of St Thomas the Martyr in Dublin, suggesting the site had been passing through various administrative hands since the dissolution of monastic properties was already beginning to reshape ecclesiastical landholding in Ireland.

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