When I saw Kilmanagh, ‘The Cell of the Monks’, on the map (near Kilkenny) it seemed a promising candidate for my list of ‘interesting but forgotten places’.
Little information was available online except that it was founded around 500 by St Natalis, son of a king of Cashel. According to an early ‘Life of St Senan’, Senan was sent as a novice ‘to the illustrious Abbot Natalis to be fully instructed under his rule and discipline’.
That a large community gathered there is clear from another story.
The monks of Kilmanagh once paid a visit to their brethren at the monastery of Gortfreagh, about two miles distant. When the abbot arrived at Gortfreagh, he realised that he had forgotten his breviary. Word was immediately sent back one by one to the monks who were in single file and whose long line reached back to Kilmanagh. The message arrived before the last monk had left and the abbot got his breviary.
Impressed by this story, and assured that the original site was beside an existing Protestant church, I was confident of finding it quickly. The church was easy to locate, it stands on a slight hill on a road leading into the village. It’s name, ‘St Aidan’s’, threw me off for a moment until my notes assured me the parish had two patrons, Natalis who died in 564 and Aidan or Edan, perhaps of Ferns, who died in 632. However there was no indication that there might have been a famous monastery there once.
In the village I asked two men talking together if they knew the location of the monastery which, after all, gave its name to the village.
They agreed that there had been an old church building which had been used as the parish church. It was said to be on the site of an old monastery. That church had been greatly cherished by the locals but had been knocked down and replaced by the modern church, across the road from where we were standing. In their opinion, the old church was far superior to the new liturgically-correct one. The way they talked about it I supposed the change had been recent but I found out later that the ’new church’ had been build in 1973.
They pointed me in the direction of where the old church once stood and warned me there was nothing to see. They were right. There was only a memorial stone which at least assured me that the site had been St Edan’s.
I visited the local parish church to see if it had reference to either saint. There wasn’t any but one stained glass window caught my eye, it asked for the prayers of St Nicholas of Myra (known worldwide as Santa Claus).
It took me some time to work this out. It seems Kilkenny claims the remains of St Nicholas who died in 343 in Myra, Turkey. When the area was overrun by the Turks at the end of the crusades the body was moved to Bari and then came into the possession of a Irish-Norman family, the Frainets, who brought it back to their ‘medieval lost town of Newtown Jerpoint’, not far from Kilmanagh.
However, the figure in the glass window was too modern to be Nicholas. On closer inspection I discovered it had been erected in memory of a local priest, Fr Murphy, whose first name was Nicholas, probably in respect for Kilkenny’s St Nicholas.
There is either too little or too much to be found in places like Kilmanagh.
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