Old Church, Dunany, Co. Louth

Co. Louth |

Churches & Chapels

Old Church, Dunany, Co. Louth

Along the Louth coastline at Dunany, a small ruined church has been so thoroughly consumed by ivy that some of its most telling details are only just visible beneath the growth.

The east window, for instance, survives as little more than two lower jambs of chamfered tufa stone, a soft, porous volcanic rock sometimes favoured in medieval construction for the ease with which it could be dressed and carved, peering out from under the vegetation. That a window carved from such material has lasted at all, given the conditions, is quietly remarkable.

The church is built from limestone boulders, blocks and slabs, and follows the undivided nave-and-chancel plan, meaning the interior was a single continuous space without a structural division between the area for the congregation and the area around the altar. Its external dimensions run to roughly 19 metres by 8 metres. What survives above the walls includes a high west bell-gable, the kind of slender raised wall pierced by an opening to hold a bell, common in Irish churches of the later medieval period, with what appears to be original buttressing at each of its angles. Further buttresses run along the north wall, one at the point where nave and chancel would have met, another at the northeast angle. The lower portion of the north wall at the east end shows a distinctive batter, a deliberate inward slope at the base of the wall intended to add stability. A doorway once opened through the south wall at the west end, though only its remains are now legible. Taken together, the bell-gable and the tufa stonework point to a sixteenth-century date for the building.

The dense ivy covering much of the structure means that reading the fabric of the walls requires some patience. The chamfered tufa jambs of the east window are the detail most worth seeking out, offering a rare glimpse of the quality of finish that the original builders brought to even a relatively modest rural church on the Louth coast.

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