Church, Kilcoe, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Kilcoe, Co. Cork

At the centre of a graveyard in Kilcoe, a roofless medieval church still holds enough carved stonework to suggest it was once a carefully considered building.

The ruins are rectangular, measuring just over nineteen metres east to west and nearly eight metres north to south, and despite centuries of exposure, several of their more decorative features have survived in recognisable form.

The most striking of these are the windows. Both the east window and the one near the eastern end of the south wall carry cusped, ogee-headed lights, a style in which the upper edge of the opening curves into a gentle S-shape and terminates in a pointed cusp, associated with late medieval ecclesiastical work in Ireland. The east window also retains its hood moulding, a projecting course of stone designed to throw rainwater clear of the opening below. A doorway in the south wall has a pointed arch with a linteled embrasure, the inner widening of the opening that softens the transition from wall to interior. Inside, two stoups, small stone basins used to hold holy water, survive in lintelled recesses in both the north and south walls. A wall-press, essentially a shallow cupboard set into the masonry, sits near the south end of the east wall, and beneath the east window the remains of a broken altar were recorded by Chavasse in 1923. By 1615 the church was already described as being in ruins, a detail noted by Brady in the mid-nineteenth century, which places the end of its active use sometime in the late sixteenth century or earlier, likely in the upheaval that accompanied the Reformation and the broader disruptions of the period in Munster.

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