St Mary's Church, Kilkenny

St Mary's Church in Gowran, Kilkenny is more than just another ruin to me. I feel I have a personal relationship with this one, because it is here that my love affair with the Office of Public Works began. The OPW manages the state run Heritage Sites throughout Ireland. The delightful and extraordinarily well informed staff at each facility taught me everything I now know about the castles, abbeys, monasteries, prehistoric monuments and cathedrals of Ireland's past.


For example, courtesy of the OPW, I know that St Mary's collegiate church was built in the late 13th century on the site of an earlier monastery. I also know that a "collegiate" church is served by clerics who live in the community rather than monks who submit to the rule of a monastery. The clerics lived in a house, now destroyed, beside the church.

The cruciform church had an aisled nave (where the congregation sits) and a long chancel (where the altar sits). In the late middle ages a tower was inserted between the nave and the chancel. In the 19th century the tower was incorporated into the parish church that was built in place of the chancel.

Impressed? You should be. I now know more about Christian architecture than I could ever have imagined paying enough attention to learn. The OPW tour guides offer a remarkably pain free doorway into new information.

It was at St Mary's that we were given the tourist's holy grail: a copy of the OPW's Heritage Map. All the OPW Heritage sites, and some others in private hands, are marked on the map. From this moment forth, as official trip navigator, I compared our roughly plotted route with the Heritage map each morning and made the necessary adjustments.