Church, Derrypatrick, Co. Meath

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Church, Derrypatrick, Co. Meath

A bullaun stone sits in the ground where the chancel floor once was, its single carved basin roughly thirty centimetres across and twenty-two centimetres deep, still collecting whatever the sky delivers.

Bullaun stones are boulders or slabs worked with one or more cup-shaped depressions, and they appear at early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, their original purpose still debated, whether liturgical, votive, or practical. Around it, the church itself has almost entirely dissolved back into the Meath landscape, its nave and chancel surviving only as low grass-covered banks and footings, rarely more than half a metre above the surrounding ground. Fragments of an ogee-headed window, the spandrel pieces that once flanked the curved decorative arch, lie in the graveyard and are set into the roadside wall near the gate, small reminders that this was once a building with some architectural ambition.

The site sits on a slight east-west ridge above low-lying ground, and its ecclesiastical history reaches back at least to the early fourteenth century, when a church at Derrypatrick was included in the taxation of Pope Nicholas IV, compiled between 1302 and 1304. By 1540 the church had come into the possession of St Thomas' Augustinian abbey in Dublin. James Ussher, writing in 1622, found the church at what he called Dirpatricke in reasonable repair, though the chancel was already ruinous. The decline continued: visitations conducted under Bishop Dopping between 1682 and 1685, and again under the Royal visitation of 1693, recorded that the walls of both nave and chancel were still standing, but that the roof had been gone since 1641. The graveyard enclosing these remains is D-shaped, roughly twenty-eight metres across in both directions, with masonry walls on most sides and an earthen bank or scarp to the south-west that may indicate the enclosure was once larger. The few surviving headstones date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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