Church, Rusheen Beg, Co. Kerry

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Rusheen Beg, Co. Kerry

Two stone baptismal fonts stacked one on top of the other, sitting on bare ground inside a ruined wall, tell you something has gone quietly wrong here over a long stretch of time.

The church at Rusheen Beg, a small townland in County Kerry, is a roofless rectangular nave built from random rubble sandstone, its interior open to the elements through a gap nearly three metres wide in the north wall. What makes the place particularly strange is the sense of things being sealed off and rearranged: the eastern end, where a chancel once stood, has been blocked by an inserted wall, and an 1846 Ordnance Survey map shows transepts and a chancel that have since entirely disappeared. The round-headed window in the west gable has been blocked too, leaving only its outline. Even the fonts seem displaced, the larger D-shaped basin placed on top of a smaller, cruder oval one, as if someone moved them for safekeeping and never returned.

The building measures roughly 8.7 metres east to west and just over six metres north to south, with interior walls that still reach 2.8 metres at their highest point and retain traces of the original lime plaster. Along the south wall, near the western end, three small ascending niches cut into the stonework may be the remains of a stairway, though what they once served is unclear. The projecting coping that runs along the tops of the north and south walls is a modest but deliberate piece of detailing, designed to throw rainwater clear of the masonry, and the fact that it survives at all suggests the core structure has held together better than the lost chancel and transepts might imply. The church was Roman Catholic, and what the 1846 map recorded was already a more complete building than anything standing today.

Access is along a farm trackway that follows the line of a disused road on the western side of the structure, so the approach is low-key and agricultural rather than marked or managed. The interior can be entered through the breach in the north wall.

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