Graveyard, Churchtown, Co. Cork

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Graveyard, Churchtown, Co. Cork

A Church of Ireland parish church that began life, if local tradition is to be believed, as a coffee house is unusual enough.

That a tower and belfry were added when the building was consecrated in 1792 suggests a fairly pragmatic attitude to ecclesiastical architecture in north Cork at the time. The church was demolished in 1894, and today there is no visible surface trace of it at all. What remains, roughly 450 metres to the west-south-west of Churchtown village, is a walled graveyard sitting quietly in open pasture, its interior slightly raised above the surrounding ground and heavily overgrown, the uneven surface hinting at what lies beneath the grass.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a wooded area of considerable size, with the cruciform church at its centre. By the time the 1905 revision was made, the woodland had gone, the church had been demolished, and the mapmakers recorded simply a graveyard of roughly forty metres square. The enclosing earthen bank, which stands about 1.5 metres high and is stone-faced on the inner north and east sides and on the outer west side, also serves as a townland boundary along its southern edge. The entrance is on the east side, through a gate flanked by stone-built mortared piers. Inside, the visible monuments include an altar tomb dated 1859, a chest tomb of 1845, and an unmarked vault; two low burial markers survive near the north-west corner. Grove White, writing in his multi-volume survey of Cork between 1905 and 1925, preserved the tradition about the coffee-house origins, which might otherwise have been lost entirely alongside the building itself.

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