Church, Cashelboy, Co. Sligo

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Church, Cashelboy, Co. Sligo

One detail in the ruined church at Cashelboy quietly reorders how you understand the whole building: a doorway broken through the western gable wall to connect directly with a tower house standing just five and a half metres away.

This was not a public entrance. It was a private one, linking a parish place of worship to the private fortified residence of a local lord, a physical expression of the way secular power and religious life were folded together in late medieval Ireland.

The church dates to the sixteenth century and is limestone-built, sitting on a north-facing slope in hilly pasture at the north-western corner of a graveyard. Its original footprint measured roughly seventeen metres east to west and just over seven metres north to south, with walls close to a metre thick. Substantial portions have since been lost: the entire north wall is gone, as is most of the upper east wall, and a large window that once filled the east end survives only as a single southern jamb. The south wall retains more character, with a blocked-up window at its western end and a smaller single-light window towards the east. At the east end, a piscina survives; this is a small stone basin, typically set into a wall near the altar, used by a priest to drain water that had been used in the Mass. Its presence confirms the liturgical function of the space. The western gable, meanwhile, stands to its full original height, and it is here that the broken-out entrance to the tower house can still be made out, the stonework around it displaced rather than finished, suggesting the opening was made for convenience rather than ceremony.

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