Church, Templelusk, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
What catches the attention at Templelusk is not grandeur but misalignment.
The nave and chancel of this ruined medieval church, set on a gentle west-facing slope in County Wicklow, are not quite in line with one another; the two portions of the building sit at a slight eccentricity, as though one was built with a different compass point in mind than the other. The nave itself has largely dissolved into a low spread of rubble, its walls averaging only about thirty centimetres in height, though portions of both inner and outer wall facings survive in place. The chancel, by contrast, retains reasonably well-defined walls. Neither portion shows any surviving trace of a doorway or window opening.
The church is a nave and chancel structure, a common form in Irish medieval ecclesiastical architecture in which a rectangular nave for the congregation connects to a smaller chancel at the east end where the altar would have stood. Here the chancel measures roughly three metres north to south and five and a half metres east to west, while the nave behind it is somewhat wider and considerably longer. Both are built of roughly coursed rubble. The whole complex sits at the eastern end of an approximately square graveyard enclosure, about fifty-two metres east to west and fifty metres north to south. The boundary of this enclosure shifts character as you move around it: an earth and stone bank with internal drystone walling on the east and south sides, a low scarp revetted with small boulders on the west, and on the north a steep scarp running alongside a sunken lane roughly five metres wide. Sunken lanes of this kind often developed through centuries of foot traffic wearing down the ground level, and this one still frames the northern edge of the site. A stream lies about a hundred metres to the west, and the ground drops away noticeably in that direction just beyond the church itself.