What is recorded here

Clonshanbo stood at the centre of a graveyard from 1174 until ruin claimed it by 1657. John de Hereford received the land, his family gave the church to the Knights Hospitallers, and the Crown took both after 1540. Richard Birmingham lost his post in 1543 for refusing to teach English, perhaps preserving Latin prayers or simply resisting Dublin’s reach. The rectangular stone shell still rises one metre above the buried ground, holding the shape of every service forgotten inside it.

At the centre of a graveyard (KD010-009002-). According to Cullen (1999, 51), Clonshanbo is mentioned in a grant of 1174 to John de Hereford whose family subsequently granted all the churches in their barony of Ikeaty to the Knights Hospitallers who are recorded in a papal taxation survey of 1302 as 'Rectors of the church of Clonsenebo, the vicarage of which was worth '30 shillings'. Following the suppression of the Hospitallers in 1540, the church and ecclesiastical income came into the possession of the Crown and in 1543 Richard Birmingham, Vicar of Clonshanbo was reported to the Barons of the Exchequer at Dublin Castle for failing to comply with a King's statute requiring him to teach English there. The church is mentioned in the Civil Survey of 1654 but is described as a ruin in an Inquisition of 1657. All that survives is a heavily overgrown, ruined rectangular structure (ext. dims. L 17m E-W: Wth 5m) built of mortared stone (wall T 0.6m; H 0.4m). The interior is higher (H 1m) than the surrounding graveyard. (O'Neill 2005, 428, 438, 440) Compiled by: Gearóid Conroy Date of upload: 10 June 2011

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