Church, Garrananassig, Co. Cork

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Church, Garrananassig, Co. Cork

At Garrananassig in County Cork, the remains of a medieval parish church have sunk so far into the ground that they barely interrupt the grass.

What was once the church of Bohillane now amounts to little more than a low, turf-covered ridge tracing a rectangle across the earth, its walls reduced to foundations roughly half a metre high and less than a metre thick. An evergreen bush at the north-east end shelters the most legible fragment of standing fabric, a stretch of random rubble held together with mud and lime mortar. At the south-west end of the south-east wall, a two-metre gap marks where the door once was, a threshold that has not been crossed for a very long time.

The church was already a ruin when the first surviving records took note of it. It was reported in that condition in 1615 and again in 1773, the latter reference appearing in Brady's published work on Irish ecclesiastical history. By that point the building had long ceased to function as a place of worship, yet the ground inside its walls continued to be used for burial from at least the eighteenth century onwards, a practice common in Ireland where the sanctity of an old church enclosure outlasted the structure itself by generations. The building measures approximately 16.2 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and just over six metres across, dimensions typical of a modest rural parish church of the medieval period. It sits adjacent to and roughly parallel with the north-west wall of an existing graveyard, the two features sharing a landscape that has accumulated the dead across several centuries.

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