Old Church, Drumard, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Churches & Chapels
On a gentle south-facing slope above Burdautein Lough in County Monaghan, there are the remains of a small rectangular church that has no name, no documented founder, and no recorded congregation.
It appears on Taylor and Skinner's road map of 1778 already marked as ruins, and the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1835 notes it simply as an "Old Church", offering nothing further. No historical document appears to mention it. Whatever community built it, worshipped in it, or eventually abandoned it left no paper trail whatsoever.
The structure itself is plain and unadorned, a rectangle measuring roughly ten and a half metres east to west and just under five metres north to south, built from roughly coursed and mortared stone with no dressed or shaped stonework anywhere visible. The north and south walls survive in part, the south wall standing to about two and a half metres at its highest, but the east and west walls have collapsed entirely into low, grass-covered mounds. A narrow opening in the south wall, around half a metre wide and surviving to well over a metre in height, marks where a window once was, though the stone surrounds have long since been removed or robbed out for use elsewhere. The entrance to the building has not been identified. Equally puzzling is the enclosure surrounding the ruins: a roughly circular earthwork about forty metres across, defined by a scarp rather than a built bank or ditch, and planted along its perimeter with whitethorn. There is no identifiable entrance through this boundary either, and, unusually for a site of this type, no evidence of any burials within it. Early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland were commonly enclosed within a circular or oval boundary, often with associated graveyards, but here the ground holds none of that corroborating evidence.