Overview
For years the only way onto Newtown Jerpoint – a whole medieval town that emptied out and disappeared under a field of grass – was on a guided walk from the farm that owns the land. That farm, Jerpoint Park, has closed, and its owners say it is not reopening; the old website now redirects to a parked domain. So the practical news comes first: you cannot currently visit the ruins, and the place to point yourself instead is the Cistercian abbey next door, which is open (see below).
The site is still worth knowing about, because there is nothing quite like it. Just off the R448, 3.2 km south-west of Thomastown, the buried street plan of a 12th-century borough survives almost intact beside the River Nore – the Heritage Council has called it one of Ireland’s best surviving examples of a deserted medieval town. It also has a churchyard tomb tied to the man who became Santa Claus.
The lost borough
Newtown Jerpoint was founded in the 1100s, probably by Earl Marshall or Griffin Fitzwilliam, to hold a crossing over the River Nore – the name means “Nore bridge”, and the town lived off its toll bridge and its position on the pilgrim road to the abbey. At its height it is thought to have held around 27 households, along with a courthouse, a woollen mill, a tannery, a brewery and as many as 14 taverns.
The town stayed active into the 1600s, then faded once the toll bridge was lost and the main route shifted away. Nobody knocked it down; the roofs simply fell in and the stone was carried off for local farm buildings, which is why the street lines and house foundations lie so cleanly preserved under the turf.
St Nicholas’s Church and the Santa Claus legend
The one building still standing is the ruined parish church, of the late 12th or early 13th century, with a late-medieval rood gallery and a tower that once housed the priest. In the churchyard is a carved tomb slab showing a cleric flanked by two knights’ heads – the reason the site draws visitors from abroad.
The story goes that Norman crusaders carried the relics of Saint Nicholas of Myra back from the Holy Land around 1200 and buried them here; an alternative version has a French family, the de Frainets, moving the relics from Bari to Nice and on to Jerpoint. The two knights on the slab are said to be the men who brought them. Historians are cautious – the Kilkenny Normans certainly collected relics, but the slab’s origin is debated – yet the tie to the figure who became Santa Claus gives the place a genuine oddity, whatever the archaeology decides.
Belmore House and the survey
At the top of the town stands Belmore House, an 18th-century hunting lodge built for the Earl of Belmore and designed by Sir Richard Morrison; a grander extension was planned but never built, the Earl’s real seat being Castle Coole in County Fermanagh.
Because the town was abandoned rather than destroyed, it has been read without a spade. In 2007 the Heritage Council and the Discovery Programme ran a LiDAR survey that saw through the grass and mapped the main street, the individual house plots and the overall grid of the vanished settlement – a textbook case of remote sensing recovering a lost landscape.
Visiting
Jerpoint Park, the working farm that gave access to the site and ran tours, sheepdog demonstrations and a tea room at Belmore House, has closed and is not reopening as of 2026. There are no current opening hours, admission or contact details, and the ruins sit on private land, so check locally before making a special trip.
The good news is next door. Jerpoint Abbey, the well-preserved Cistercian abbey founded in 1158, is an OPW site open March to November, daily 09:30–17:30 (last admission 17:00), with free parking; it’s closed December to February. It’s a 20-minute drive from Kilkenny City via the R697, or reachable on Bus Éireann route 833 to Thomastown and a short walk. Pair it with the Medieval Mile in the city for a full day on the Nore.