Church, Barraduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Churches & Chapels
The small Catholic church in Barraduff village carries a quiet architectural puzzle within its walls.
It is a cruciform building, meaning it is laid out in the shape of a cross, with transepts projecting outward towards the eastern end. Yet when surveyors recorded it on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, they marked it not as a cross but as a T-shaped structure, suggesting that at some point between that first mapping and the present day the building acquired an additional arm, completing the cruciform plan. It is the kind of detail that slips past casual observation but rewards a second look.
The church sits on the north side of the main street in Barraduff, a small village in County Kerry. Its long axis runs east to west, which is a common orientation for Christian churches, broadly aligning the altar end towards the east. Inside, pointed windows admit the light, giving the interior a spare Gothic quality. The main entrance is not immediately obvious from the street; it is tucked behind a porch set into the west end of the south wall, which means a first-time visitor approaching from the road may walk straight past it. A more recent bell tower stands to the left of that doorway, adding a vertical accent that contrasts with the low horizontal lines of the older fabric.
