Church, Kilmacowen, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Churches & Chapels
Projecting from the outer face of the east gable of a ruined church in Kilmacowen, County Sligo, is a small carved sandstone head, measuring roughly fifteen centimetres at its widest point.
It sits adjacent to a pointed window and looks outward from the wall, its facial features worn almost smooth by weather and time. Such carved heads are not unusual survivals in medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture, but they are easy to overlook, and this one clings to a building that is itself largely forgotten.
The church stands in the western half of a graveyard and is built from split stone rubble masonry with extensive use of pinnings, small stone fragments packed into the gaps between larger stones to stabilise the wall face. The structure measures roughly twenty-one metres in internal length and seven metres in width. Of its four walls, only the east gable survives intact, along with a short section of the north wall at its north-east angle; the west gable is gone entirely. The east window is a pointed light of sandstone set within an embrasure, and the rear arch above it preserves something quietly remarkable: the negative impressions of wattles, the woven rods used in early construction, still visible in the plaster on the underside of the arch. This is a material trace of the building techniques used when the church was being finished or altered, preserved almost by accident. The east gable also contains an aumbry, a small wall recess typically used to store liturgical vessels, set near its southern end at ground level. A second aumbry sits in the south wall, beneath a partly destroyed window near the east end. Further along the south wall, a blocked-up doorway with a pointed arch survives towards the west end, and the ragged break in the middle of the same wall shows faint signs of an inward splay at its edges, suggesting a second window once occupied that space before the wall gave way.
The church sits within an active or formerly active graveyard, so the ground around it is likely uneven and the ruins themselves are not stabilised. The east gable, with its window, aumbry, and the small eroded head projecting just beside the sandstone frame, is where the most survives and where the most repays careful attention.