Cordangan Church (in ruins), Cordangan, Co. Tipperary

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Cordangan Church (in ruins), Cordangan, Co. Tipperary

A ruined church that was carefully measured by Ordnance Survey correspondents in 1840 and then slowly taken apart by the following century is not especially unusual in Ireland.

What is quietly odd about the remains at the base of Slievenamuck hill in County Tipperary is how precisely those mid-nineteenth-century observations can still be tested against what stands today, and how faithfully the stonework has recorded its own long decline.

When the OS letters were compiled in 1840, the building was already a ruin, but a relatively legible one. The writers recorded a structure sixty-seven feet three inches in length and twenty-one feet six inches in breadth, with side walls still roughly eleven feet high. By that point the east gable and north wall had been destroyed to their foundations, but the south wall and part of the west gable survived to near their original height. Built of sandstone conglomerate rubble, roughly coursed and bonded with lime mortar, the fabric was already giving way unevenly. The south wall, which still reaches a maximum height of about 3.2 metres, now bows slightly inward along its length and much of its internal face has collapsed. The doorway the OS writers noted near the west end of that wall, described then as much disfigured but measurable at six feet high and two feet eight inches wide with a flat lintel, is still present, though it has been heavily repaired and the original hanging eye, the iron fitting that once carried the door pivot, re-inserted. A flat-headed window at the east end of the same wall, with a double external chamfer cut into its stonework, appears to have been reconstructed within what was originally a splaying embrasure, an inward-widening recess designed to draw more light into the interior. At some point later in the nineteenth century, someone built a low replacement wall along the line of the vanished north wall, a practical act that also quietly confirmed where the original had stood. The west gable retains one unusual detail: a small rectangular opening, barely nineteen centimetres high, placed centrally near its base and splaying inward, the purpose of which is not recorded.

The church sits in meadow at the foot of a north-facing slope, orientated very slightly northeast to southwest, close to and parallel with the north wall of the adjoining graveyard. Both the church and graveyard are described as very overgrown, so anyone making their way there should expect to work through significant vegetation before the surviving masonry becomes fully visible.

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