Church, Ballintemple, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
In a field on the edge of the Aughrim valley in County Wicklow, there is a church.
Or rather, there was one. The site is completely invisible at ground level today, leaving nothing for the eye to catch except ordinary farmland on a gentle north-east-facing slope. What persists instead is the name: locally, the land is still called the Church Field, a piece of oral geography that has quietly outlasted whatever masonry once stood there.
The church was recorded within a quadrangular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, one of the most systematic cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, which captured many ecclesiastical and archaeological features that were already in decay or partial ruin at the time of survey. The place-name Ballintemple is itself suggestive: the Irish baile an teampall translates roughly as the townland of the church, suggesting the building was significant enough to anchor the naming of the settlement around it. Beyond the map notation and the enclosure shape, the historical record is thin. No dedication, no founding date, and no account of when the structure fell or was cleared away has been attached to this site.