placenamesToem
Tuaim
At Toem near Cappawhite, a surviving tower, parish records and an early account of local customs preserve different strands of church history.
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
- Tuaim · Irish · main form · validated name
- Toem · English · main form
Place & story
The tower in the graveyard
Saint Anne’s Church survives chiefly through its nineteenth-century tower: three stages of sandstone masonry, with pointed openings and limestone pinnacles above the parapet. The nave has disappeared. The architectural inventory records later nineteenth-century alterations to the tower, so its present appearance belongs to more than one building campaign. Graves and the entrance gates retain the setting of a parish church. [2]
Repairs, replacement and dismantling
Writing in 1917, St John D. Seymour traced repeated repairs to Toem’s church through visitation records. By 1834 it was considered beyond repair; in 1837 services were being held at Cappagh House. A replacement followed, although Seymour could not establish its date. After Donohill’s church opened in 1856, Toem was used less frequently. Seymour placed its dismantling around 1891 and recorded that proceeds from building materials helped repair Donohill’s roof. [3]
Records lost in 1922
The Representative Church Body Library lists three volumes of Toem registers destroyed in the Public Record Office fire of 1922. Together they covered baptisms from 1802 to 1886, marriages from 1804 to 1845 and burials from 1803 to 1877. Their loss is distinct from the earlier disappearance of the church building. [4]
A well that moved
Seymour also recorded a local story that a holy well and two bullaun stones had moved after a desecration near Toem bridge. He described rounds and cloth offerings as practices remembered in his own time. This is an attested early twentieth-century account of local belief, rather than evidence that the well physically moved. [3]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Tipperary
- Barony
- Kilnamanagh Upper
- Civil parish
- Toem
- Coordinates
- 52.58321, -8.19181 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1414386 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Toem. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Saint Anne’s Church (Toem), NIAH 22205001 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- Notes on a Tipperary Parish, 1917, pages 38–39 and 42 · St John D. Seymour / Cork Historical and Archaeological Society
- Toem Parish Register List, P.1080 · Representative Church Body Library
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.