2011:451 - KILKINURE CHURCH, OXFORD, KILTIMAGH, Mayo

Over a ten-year period the local graveyard committee have been endeavouring to tidy, conserve and make safe the church ruins in the town graveyard. The church remains, located in the western sector of an ecclesiastical enclosure, are poorly preserved, with most of the west gable and some of the east end intact. Collapsed, grassed-over rubble covered much of the central section of the east wall. Later graves have led to the removal of the western half of the north and south walls. A damaged alcove survives on the north wall at its eastern end, while surviving stretches of the north and south walls are severely defaced. An assessment was carried out in 2004 and a conservation architect carried out a report on the church later that year. There was a report of damage to the church in July 2007 and this appears to have entailed ivy removal. A letter from the Department of the Environment to the local Heritage Officer indicated that works to the church had taken place contrary to best practice and without required notification.
The church lies in the southern sector of the townland of Oxford, and this townland is rendered in Irish as ‘Bullaun’ by O’Donovan in 1838. It seems probable that such a stone had once stood at these ecclesiastical remains but its whereabouts has become lost over time. The church name ‘Kilkinure’ (Cill Cinn Iuthar) is translated by O’Donovan as ‘the church on the hill of the yews’. Other reference material to the church is almost non-existent, apart from one line on page 170 of Knox’s Notes on the early history of the diocese of Tuam, Killala and Achonry (1904), which showed the general run of dimensions of a group of eleven churches in a chapter dealing with church architecture. Kilkinure, however, was one of three churches from the list which could not be ascribed to any particular architectural type, owing no doubt to poorly preserved remains and lack of architectural features.
The current project has excavated the rubble from around the east gable wall but this has added nothing to the archaeological record. Narrow trenches, 0.2–0.4m wide, have been partly excavated inside the surviving north and east walls and outside much of the surviving south wall. The original eastern end of the south wall had been badly defaced externally and for 2m a later crooked drystone wall had overlain it internally. Almost all the newly uncovered masonry showed signs of having been heavily burned, and this has also been the case with some loose stonework uncovered. The burning has been so extensive both above and below ground that a fire may have led to the demise of the building. Numerous fragments of clay pipes and early 20th-century glass and pottery were found but there were no archaeological features or artefacts. There has been no dressed stonework uncovered or recovered to date.
Conservation work has been carried out on the surviving stretch of north wall; this entailed repair of the existing alcove, repair and pointing of the robbed section of the wall and capping of the wall. Further small-scale excavation, repair and tidying of existing grave-slabs will continue throughout 2012.

Roscrea, Moyard, Co. Galway