Architectural feature, Meedian, Co. Westmeath

A carved doorway at the north-east end and a window above the entrance both appear to date from the fifteenth century, making them considerably older than the church that now holds them.

The present building replaced an earlier T-plan chapel, a simple rectangular structure with a short transept that gave it the rough shape of the letter T, which appears on a Boyd-Belvedere estate map dated 1818. That earlier chapel was likely an eighteenth-century construction, and there is no evidence of any church at this location before 1700. The medieval stonework, then, was almost certainly salvaged and reused rather than built in place. The most plausible source is the ruined medieval church at Castlelost, roughly three kilometres to the north-east, where dressed stone with comparable carvings has survived. Salvaging dressed stone from older, ruined structures was common practice in Irish building history, particularly when a community lacked the resources to commission new carved work from scratch.

The window is the more elaborate of the two pieces. It is a tall, twin-light ogee-headed window, meaning its two openings each terminate in a pointed arch with a slight S-shaped curve, a form common in late medieval ecclesiastical architecture across Ireland. Above the lights runs a hood moulding, a projecting ridge designed to throw rainwater clear of the glass. The terminals of that moulding are carved differently on each side: a spiral on the left, an interlaced pattern on the right. Beneath the hood, three small motifs are cut into the stone, a spiral, a star, and what appears to be a twin-pronged spear. These details are not decorative afterthoughts; they reflect the kind of considered, skilled stonecutting that would have required a specialist craftsman, which makes the question of where the window originally stood all the more interesting.