Church, Cloan, Co. Cork

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Church, Cloan, Co. Cork

At Cloan in County Cork, a graveyard holds two ruined churches rather than one, each representing a different century's attempt to maintain a place of worship, and each now abandoned to ivy and open sky.

The older of the two sits at the centre of the graveyard itself, its walls reduced to three ivy-clad fragments: the northern half of the east gable, a stretch of the north wall, and two sections of the south wall. The point where the south wall breaks off is thought to mark the original doorway, and two windows survive in that same south wall, with a further window near the east end of the north wall and one centred in the east gable, though none retain any tracery or dressings that might suggest a date.

The dimensions of the older church have been a mild source of disagreement among those who recorded it. A measurement cited by Downes, as reproduced in Lunham's 1909 account, gives the building as fifty feet by sixteen feet, while Webster, writing in 1932, put it at seventy-two feet by eighteen feet, a discrepancy substantial enough to suggest the two men were pacing different things, or that parts of the structure had already been lost between their visits. What both accounts agree on is that the church was already in ruins by 1615, a fact noted by Brady in his 1863 historical compilation, though Lunham also records that the greater parts of the walls were still standing as late as 1700. The congregation that had once used the medieval building was eventually provided with a new church, a plain rectangular structure built immediately to the northwest of the graveyard in 1842. That building, too, is now roofless, its western gable accompanied by a ruined porch, giving the site an odd quality of doubled dereliction, one ruin watching over another across a matter of a few metres.

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