Church (in ruins), Ennistimon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Churches & Chapels
At the highest point of a prominent hill in Ennistymon, County Clare, a roofless Church of Ireland building has been watching over the town for nearly two centuries of abandonment.
Its walls still stand at their original height of 6.5 metres, ivy has been stripped back, and recent repointing is visible on the interior stonework, all of which gives the ruin an oddly maintained quality, a shell that has been preserved rather than simply left alone. It sits in the north-western corner of a trapezoidal graveyard, and the elevation means it can be seen from most points in the surrounding area.
The church was built in 1778, and according to local records had already fallen into ruin by at least 1830, meaning it was an active place of worship for a remarkably short period, perhaps little more than fifty years. What remains is a rectangular building of mortared random-coursed masonry, a technique in which stones are laid in rough, irregular courses rather than neat uniform rows, with stressed quoins, the dressed corner stones that give the angles of the structure their definition. The west gable has a pointed-arch doorway, and above it a blocked opening that suggests there was once a gallery or choir loft inside. Four pointed-arch single-light windows survive, three along the north wall and one in the east, their spare geometry typical of modest late-eighteenth-century Protestant church building in rural Ireland. The interior is scattered with graveslabs and headstones, so the building functions now as both ruin and open-air repository of local memorial stonework.