What is recorded here

Killossory, a subdivision of Rathduff, lies about a mile south of Kells where the road to Knocktopher crosses a little stream separating Rathduff and Stonecarty. Carrigan in 1905 suggested the lost church stood either beside the ford in a small green field or on the brink itself, where a forge later occupied an ancient mound of black graveyard earth removed around 1820. The mound has vanished from modern satellite views, leaving only the memory of dark soil and old horse shoes to mark where worship and forgetting once met.

Carrigan (1905, vol. 4, 51) describes, ‘Killossory, a subdivision of Rathduff, [which] is situated about a mile south of Kells, at the point where the road from Kells to Knocktopher crosses the little stream separating the townlands of Rathduff and Stonecarty’. He goes on to speculate about the location of the church of Killossory, suggesting that it may have stood, ‘either (a) in the small gree field beside the ford, to the west of the road, where black earth, such as is always to be found on the sites of ancient graveyards, has been dug up, also old horse shoes &c.; or (b) on the very brink of the ford, where a forge till lately occupied the site of an ancient mound composed for a great part of black, graveyard earth, and removed about 1820’ (ibid.). There is no indication of a levelled mound on satellite imagery (Google Earth, imagery up to March 2022; OS Ortho up to 2018). However, the 1st (1839) ed. OS 6-inch map indicates a building immediately NE of the ford which is not longer indicated on the 25-inch map which was surveyed in 1899, presumably this is the forge mentioned by Carrigan, though it is not named on the OS map. The mound has been plotted to this location. Compiled by: Jean Farrelly Date of upload: 18 April 2023

The monument record does not grant public access. Check the route and ask the landowner before entering private land.