Catholic Church, Ballynacarrow, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Churches & Chapels
In the small County Sligo village of Ballynacarrow, a Catholic church once stood on the north-western side of the road, its walls still reaching roughly two and a half metres in height as recently as the 1960s.
Today nothing of it remains. What makes the site quietly strange is how close its replacement is: the church of Saints Fechin and Lassara was built approximately one hundred metres away, on the opposite side of the same road, close enough that the congregation would barely have crossed a street before the old walls began their slow disappearance.
The two dedications of the successor church point to early medieval Irish saints with strong regional associations. Fechin is most commonly linked to the monastery of Fore in County Westmeath, though his cult spread widely, and Lassara is a less frequently commemorated female saint, suggesting a local devotional tradition that the new building was careful to preserve even as the physical fabric of the old one was left to decline. The original church on the north-western site predates the current building, though the exact date of its construction or the circumstances of the congregation's move across the road are not recorded in what survives about the place.