Site of Templeboy Church, Pollagh, Co. Kilkenny
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Churches & Chapels
In the fields near Pollagh, a small church once stood, and nobody is entirely sure where.
The site known as Templeboy Church is one of those places that survives more as a cartographic puzzle than as a physical presence. There is no masonry, no earthwork, no visible trace at ground level, just a few converging lines on old maps and a local memory that has held the name, if not quite the location, reasonably steady across the centuries.
The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1839 marked a rectangular area of roughly 50 metres east to west and 15 metres north to south, though part of its boundary was rendered in dotted lines, the cartographers' way of signalling approximation rather than certainty. Immediately to the north, in an adjoining field, the same map recorded a holy well called Toberboy, a pairing that is quite characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a church and a well dedicated to the same patron tended to cluster together. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised the map around 1900, the indicated site had shifted slightly westward to a small field of around 22 by 13 metres. Writing in 1969, O'Kelly noted that the church was known locally as Teámpall beag, meaning the little church, and that its site was remembered as the Cillín field. A cillín, in Irish usage, typically refers to an unconsecrated burial ground for unbaptised children, and a possible children's burial ground has indeed been identified in the area corresponding to the earlier map. The small field shown on the 1900 revision no longer exists as a distinct enclosure, though two of its old boundaries can still be traced in the landscape, the southwest boundary and part of the northwest, retained like faint punctuation in the surrounding farmland.