Furness House
   


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Furness House
  The medieval church at Furness
(National Monument No. 568)
 

Some 200 yards / meters to the rear of the house stands the beautiful Early Christian church (of c.500AD) that was extended by the Normans in 1210.


     On the Norman conquest of Ireland after 1169, lands in Kildare were assigned to Adam de Hereford who in turn bequeathed them to the monastery of St. Thomas in Dublin . This monastery extended the church in 1210, allowing a roof for the congregation, which must have numbered over 100 at that time. The present townland of Great Forenaghts was then its parish. "Forenaghts" derives from the Gaelic "Fornochta", a "bare hill" which rises east of the church.

  In the 1530s the monastery was dissolved by the Crown and its land at Furness was bought by the Ashe family, merchants in Naas. In 1650, raids from Dublin into Kildare by the Cromwellian army were led by Colonel Hewson, who burnt the church and the nearby Hartwell Castle . It has been roofless ever since, but the walls were restored by the OPW in 1968.

       Adjacent to the church is the "Furness Yew", recorded as one of the largest yews in Ireland as far back as 1860 and the second-biggest in 1897. It is probably the oldest living thing in County Kildare , certainly older than the Norman extension of 1210.


        The church has doors and windows edged with "Tufa" stone, a form of limestone favoured by Cistercians in Europe from 1150. The exception is a "leper window", usually blocked up now in older churches.

Decades after the church was burnt, the Nevill family "married the land" and notably they allowed local people to continue to bury their dead around the church alongside their ancestors. One gravestone from the early C18 reads "IHS" signifying a Catholic burial in the Penal Law times, though the Nevills were protestants and members of the Dublin Parliament. They were clearly enlightened and unbigoted unlike some others. Burials stopped in the 1840s when the then owners built a wall around the estate, as a famine relief measure.