Church, Killamurren, Co. Cork
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Churches & Chapels
Beneath the farmyard at Killamurren in County Cork, a small early church once stood inside a roughly circular enclosure about the size of half an acre.
The place-name preserves what the ground no longer shows: Cill Atha Muirín, meaning the Church of Muirin's Ford, a dedication that implies both a named saint or figure and a crossing point that mattered enough to anchor a community around it. By the time the relevant Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn in 1935, the enclosure was still legible in the landscape, its sub-circular outline running approximately seventy metres north to south and sixty metres east to west. Farm buildings have since removed most of it.
When the antiquarian P. Power visited and wrote about the site in 1923, the physical evidence was considerably more legible. He recorded the foundations of a small church, measuring twenty-seven feet by fifteen feet, still distinctly traceable within the enclosure. To its south he noted a bullán stone and traces of further buildings. A bullán is a rounded stone, often granite, bearing one or more cup-shaped hollows worn or worked into its surface; such stones are commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, where they may have served ritual, grinding, or curative functions. By the time the site was formally assessed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in the early 1990s, neither the bullán nor any of the associated structures could be found. The church foundations had vanished too, absorbed into the working farm that now occupies the ground.
