Architectural fragment, Baurroe, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At a roadside in Baurroe, two chunks of dressed stone sit as the last surviving pieces of a church spire that no longer exists, in a village that may not immediately suggest any particular loss.
They are fragments of a pinnacle, the kind of slender decorative turret that once projected upward from each corner of a Church of Ireland tower, giving the whole structure a sense of vertical ambition. There were four such pinnacles once. Now there are two pieces of one, lying where they fell.
The church they came from stood in Feakle, a small settlement in east Clare. Built in 1824, it was a Church of Ireland parish church, and its tower carried the four pinnacles that were typical of the Gothic Revival and Gothick styles fashionable in ecclesiastical building of that period. The church was demolished in the 1950s, but at some point before it disappeared entirely, at least some of its stonework was salvaged. These two fragments were placed upright at the roadside in Baurroe as an ornamental feature, a modest kind of monument to a building that was otherwise gone. That arrangement did not last either. Sometime in the mid to late 1990s the fragments were toppled, and they have remained where they fell since.