Church, Mayne, Co. Westmeath

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Church, Mayne, Co. Westmeath

Scattered around a graveyard in Mayne, County Westmeath, are fragments of a medieval church that no longer exists as a standing structure, yet refuses to entirely disappear.

A limestone ogee-headed window spandrel, its hollow curve still legible, has been set into the east face of the graveyard's western boundary wall. A cut-stone mullion, with diamond-shaped bar holes once designed to hold window bars, has been reused somewhere to the southwest of the later church, possibly pressed into service as a gravemarker. Other carved stones from the same vanished building may be embedded in the surrounding walls or lying quietly among the graves. The medieval church is gone, but its dressed stonework keeps turning up.

The site has a long religious history, even if much of it is difficult to pin down precisely. Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, noted that a religious establishment was said to have been founded at Mayne by St. Fechan of Fore, the seventh-century saint associated with the important monastic site a few miles to the north. A medieval church at Mayne appears on the seventeenth-century Down Survey map of Fore Parish, confirming that something stood here long before the present building. That present building is a Church of Ireland church dedicated to St. Nicholas, erected around 1806 with the help of a £500 grant from the Board of First Fruits, a body that funded Protestant church construction across Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lewis described it as a neat building in excellent repair at the time of writing. It is no longer in use. The church is a compact two-bay hall with a three-stage tower to the west, built of rubble limestone with ashlar detailing, crenellated parapet, and corner pinnacles capped with ball finials. The pointed-arched windows retain their timber Y-tracery and leaded glazing. Inside, a late medieval font survives, though it was not accessible when the site was last examined.

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