Church, Knockatemple, Co. Wicklow

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Church, Knockatemple, Co. Wicklow

One of the more quietly telling details at this ruined medieval church in County Wicklow is what is no longer there.

A bullaun stone, one of those granite boulders with a deliberately cut basin hollowed into their surface, once stood near the site and was removed sometime in the late nineteenth century to a private residence roughly two kilometres to the north-east in Knockraheen. Bullauns are among the more enigmatic features of early Irish ecclesiastical sites; the basins were likely used for grinding or ritual purposes, and their presence usually signals an older, pre-Norman layer of activity at a place. The one that remains, fixed in the ground about 35 metres north-west of the church, has its basin cut into a steeply sloping surface, which gives some sense of how these stones were worked into whatever topography the builders found rather than set on level ground.

The church itself sits on the western edge of a small steep gully, with the land falling away gently southward toward the Vartry Reservoir. The structure is a nave and chancel plan, meaning it follows the standard medieval arrangement of a rectangular congregational space connected to a smaller sanctuary at the east end, and its internal dimensions run to roughly 14.3 metres by 6.4 metres. The walls, now reduced to foundations between 40 and 75 centimetres high, are built from shale slabs with some larger granite boulders incorporated. There were doorways in both the west and south walls, and a piece of chamfered stone from the pointed arch of the south doorway still lies inside the ruin, a small piece of worked medieval masonry sitting where it fell. A full-length extension runs along the entire southern side of the building, and a smaller annexe is attached to the eastern end of the north wall, suggesting the church was altered or expanded at some point in its life. The whole complex sits toward the north-western corner of a rectangular graveyard measuring 60 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, with the northern and western sides defined by a low earthen and stone bank and an external fosse, a shallow ditch, which may be the remnant of an earlier enclosure predating the standing church.

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