Church in Ruins, Churchpark, Co. Mayo

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Church in Ruins, Churchpark, Co. Mayo

Most of the walls of this ruined church in Churchpark, County Mayo, have sunk back into the earth, leaving only sod-covered footings to trace the outline of a rectangular building that once measured nearly seventeen metres from east to west.

A single surviving stretch of the south wall, just over five metres long and rising to more than three metres, gives a sense of what stood here. That remnant is built from random rubble, the lower courses resting on very large boulders set along a shallow projecting plinth, a construction detail that suggests some care in the original building. Breaks in both the south and north walls, partly filled with loose rubble, hint at doorways or at later disturbance.

The site sits within a graveyard, and pressed close against the south wall is a children's burial ground, a low rectangular platform of the kind sometimes called a cillín in Irish tradition, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred. The proximity of the two, church wall and children's platform side by side, is quietly affecting. Sometime after the church fell out of use, its south wall was absorbed into a later field boundary; that wall now continues as a single line of contiguous stones and boulders running north-west from the church's south-west corner and a short distance south-south-east from its south-east angle, where it borders the eastern edge of the children's burial ground. The building of the living, the burial of the dead, and the division of farmland have all left their mark on the same stretch of masonry.

About three hundred metres to the south-east, the remains of a second church and a holy well occupy the same landscape, suggesting this part of Mayo once held a cluster of early ecclesiastical activity that has since been largely absorbed into fields and grass.

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Pete F
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