Chapel, Kilcumreragh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Churches & Chapels
In the north-west quadrant of a graveyard on a low hillock in County Westmeath, a small ruined building stands a few metres west of the old church, largely smothered in ivy.
Behind an iron gate set into a pointed cut-stone doorway, two carved memorial slabs lean against the interior walls on either side of the entrance, one showing a human skeleton carrying a scythe and the other a death's-head with cross-bones and the letters IHS. These are not unusual motifs in post-medieval Irish funerary carving, but finding them propped here, facing each other across a nettle-choked floor in a roofless five-metre-square structure, gives the place a concentrated, somewhat theatrical quality. Built into the south wall roughly a metre above ground is a larger slab, possibly a graveslab, bearing a heraldic device that has weathered to the edge of legibility: something like a dog or lion with a long tail, and above it an arm holding a sword. The inscription beneath has so far resisted reading.
The church itself appears on the Down Survey map of Moycashell Barony, produced between 1653 and 1659, where it is shown as a rectangular building with what may be a residential range or bell-tower at its east end. At that time the land, recorded as 'Killcrumriagh', belonged to Thomas Geoghegan, described on the map as an 'Irish Papist' and the owner of 271 acres. The Down Survey was a vast Cromwellian land-mapping exercise, and the notation of Geoghegan's religion was not incidental; it was part of the administrative machinery for redistributing land confiscated from Catholic landowners. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the site on its six-inch map in 1837, the church was shown with a mortuary chapel at the east end of its south wall, and this second, freestanding mortuary chapel was already present to the west. A corn mill at Ballynabarna, built some time after 1700, stands about 110 metres to the north-north-east, and a mill race or stream runs roughly 70 metres to the east, details that place the graveyard within what was once a modestly busy rural landscape rather than an isolated one.