Graveyard, Glebe (Barrymore By, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Glebe (Barrymore By, Co. Cork

A disused graveyard containing eighty-five headstones, the oldest dating to 1751, surrounds a Church of Ireland building that is no longer a church at all but a storage facility, its pews and fittings long since removed.

The site sits on the east side of a road about 800 metres south-southwest of Dungourney village in east Cork, occupying a roughly square enclosure of around 70 metres on each side. What makes the place quietly unusual is the layering of absences: an ancient parish that outlasted its medieval fabric, a ruined church replaced by a plain Georgian one, and that replacement now stripped of its sacred purpose while the headstones accumulate quietly around it.

The land here was the site of the ancient parish church of Dungourney, though by 1774 the original structure was already recorded as a ruin, with no trace of it surviving above ground today. The Church of Ireland building that replaced it was constructed in 1800, and by 1837 the topographer Samuel Lewis was describing it as a plain building with a shingled spire, noting that money had recently been granted for its repair. The architecture is modest: a rectangular nave with an attached tower at the west end, the tower low and two-storeyed, capped with a flat pyramidal slate roof. The south wall carries three windows with paired lights set in limestone surrounds, while the north wall has three blocked or blind windows, an arrangement that gives the exterior an oddly sealed quality. A stained glass window remains in the east gable. Inside, two wooden partitions flanking the former altar create the impression of a chancel, though the building has been deconsecrated and any liturgical fittings removed.

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