placenamesKilloe
Cill Eo
St Catherine’s Church and its surrounding burial grounds anchor Killoe’s history, beside land once described through its bogs, cultivation and limestone quarry.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Cill Eo · Irish · main form · validated name
- Killoe · English · main form
Place & story
Church, quarry and cultivated ground
The historical placename description preserved by Longford Library presents Killoe as a small townland of 129 acres. It records cultivated land, a little plantation and two substantial stretches of bog along the northern boundary. A limestone quarry lay between the church and the nearby road. These details place the church within a working rural landscape, where farming and the extraction of building stone existed close together. [2]
St Catherine’s changing outline
St Catherine’s Church was built in 1824, with funding from the Board of First Fruits and a contribution from Willoughby Bond of nearby Farragh. Its cross-shaped plan distinguishes it from the simpler rectangular churches often associated with that building programme. The national architectural survey attributes the design tentatively to John Hargrave. It also suggests that the prominent western tower was added during alterations by Welland and Gillespie in 1861. [3]
An older place of burial
The present church occupies an older religious site: a church at Killoe appears on the Down Survey map of 1654. Two burial grounds surround the later building, with the Church of Ireland graveyard around the church and a Roman Catholic burial ground to the north. The architectural survey records a legible memorial dated 1741 in the latter. Standing stones, flat slabs and box tombs preserve different forms of commemoration within this shared landscape. [3]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Killoe. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Killoe: historical placename description · Longford Library, Archives and Local Studies
- Saint Catherine’s Church, Killoe Glebe,13400914 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.