Bunown Church, Bunown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Churches & Chapels
One of the more quietly curious things about the ruined church at Bunown is that some of its stonework is still in use, just not where you might expect.
A piece of late medieval punch-dressed chamfered stone, cut and shaped by a mason who worked the surface with a punch to give it a distinctive textured finish, was lifted from the church and set into the east gable of a nearby boathouse, where it serves as a window head. The church itself sits in the western quarter of a graveyard about a hundred metres from the shore of Killinure Bay, at the southern end of Lough Ree, looking out over what is now called Temple's Island.
The building's remaining walls, the southern and western faces, are so thoroughly covered in ivy that close inspection is largely impossible. What can still be made out is striking enough: the west gable stands two storeys high, roughly seven metres in external length, and retains a first-floor window and an aumbry, a small recess built into a wall for storing liturgical items. Traces of stone vaulting survive at ground-floor level along the inner face of the west gable, suggesting the church once incorporated a two-storey priest's residence at its western end, a not uncommon arrangement in medieval Irish parish churches. The south wall, at roughly seventeen metres, is considerably longer, with a small aumbry surviving near its eastern end. The east gable has vanished entirely, and ivy has swallowed most of the northeast angle. During the reign of Henry VIII, Bunown was grouped with several other chapels and united with the bishopric and see of Meath, subordinated to the parish church of Loughsewdy. The Down Survey map of the 1650s still shows the church standing on the shoreline of Killinure Bay with four acres of glebeland attached. By 1837, Samuel Lewis was describing monuments to the Dillon family among the ruins, and noting the nearby remains of Bunown Castle about a kilometre to the north-northeast.
The site is accessible today, though the ivy that covers the surviving walls means much of the architectural detail remains out of reach. Lady Well lies about 185 metres to the south-southwest, and the boathouse with its repurposed medieval stonework is only a short distance beyond that, making the immediate area worth exploring slowly rather than in passing.