Church, Kilbolane, Co. Cork

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Church, Kilbolane, Co. Cork

Beneath the south wall of a ruined sandstone church in north Cork, there is said to be a burial vault where skulls were once visible.

The church itself sits in open pasture, enclosed within a curiously diamond-shaped earthwork boundary, and its interior was systematically dug out by treasure hunters in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Whatever they were looking for, and whatever they found, is unrecorded. What remains is a roofless rectangular shell, roughly thirteen metres long and seven wide, with steeply pitched gables still partly standing, its cut stone almost entirely robbed out over the centuries. A fragment of a limestone sill for a mullioned two-light window lies near the southeast corner, a reminder that the building was once finished to a considerably higher standard than its current state suggests.

The name translates, according to nineteenth-century field records, as Bowen's Church, and the building is said to have formerly served as a Roman Catholic chapel. The Bowens were an Anglo-Irish family who occupied Kilbolane Castle from around 1660, and who are better known to literary history as the ancestors of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. They left the area around 1776 when they relocated to Bowen's Court in east Cork, and the church at Kilbolane may well have been built or substantially rebuilt during the century or so they were in residence. The enclosure around it is defined on three sides by low earthen banks, with a steeper natural drop of about 1.3 metres down to a stream along the eastern and southeastern edges, and a taller bank planted with mature trees to the northwest. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1904, and 1936 all show the site as part of an extensive belt of woodland, with no indication that it functioned as a graveyard, though the vault beneath the south wall suggests otherwise. There are no visible grave markers today.

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