Church, Glebe (Glenquin By.), Co. Limerick

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Glebe (Glenquin By.), Co. Limerick

The windows give it away.

Three of them survive in this roofless ruin in County Limerick, and two carry cusped ogee-headed lights, a style of Gothic tracery in which the opening narrows to a gentle S-curved point at the top, associated with late-medieval church building in Ireland. The mullion that once divided the east window's double light is gone, but the hood moulding above and the recessed spandrels to either side remain, as does the widely splayed embrasure behind it. That level of decorative ambition, even in a modest rural parish church, is worth pausing over. So is the small recess just east of the south window: an aumbry or piscina, a niche used for storing sacred vessels or for draining water used in liturgical washing, its surround cut in limestone with a pointed arch and a moulded stop chamfer. The base is now buried, but the stonework above it is still precise and deliberate.

This is the remains of the late-medieval parish church of Monagay, in the barony of Glenquin. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted it in his surveys of 1904 to 1905. The building is rectangular, measuring roughly 25.75 metres east to west and 7.9 metres north to south internally, constructed of roughly coursed stone. The side walls survive to their full height, but the top of the east gable has collapsed, and the west wall has been reduced to little more than footings. By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the site, two slit windows still stood in the west gable; those are gone now. There is also a break nearly three metres wide in the north wall, west of centre, the origin of which the record does not explain. Entry is through a doorway near the west end of the south wall, the surround itself missing though the sill remains in place, covered by a segmental arch.

The church sits east of centre within a graveyard that is still in use. Burial plots cover the interior floor, with headstones ranging from recent to the earliest dated example from 1807. The site is recorded under the reference LI036-125002- in the national monuments record. Visitors approaching the windows closely will notice how differently the three embrasures are treated: the east with a round-arched head, the south with a segmental arch, and the north with a simple lintel. These are not grand ruins, and the surrounding landscape makes no particular drama of them, which is perhaps why the quality of the surviving stonework, especially around the aumbry surround and the east window, tends to come as a mild surprise.

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