Chapel, Kilmaglish, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Churches & Chapels
In a patch of woodland in County Westmeath, a low rectangle of ivy-covered stone sits at the northern edge of Kilmaglish graveyard.
The walls rise to little more than a metre at their highest point, and the doorway in the southern wall has been so thoroughly destroyed that only its rough width of around a metre can still be made out. What survives is barely recognisable as a building at all, yet the geometry is clear enough: a chapel roughly fourteen and a half metres long and just over seven metres wide, oriented east to west in the manner of Christian worship.
The structure is thought to be the remains of a Church of Ireland building from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, though its origins are somewhat elusive. The Down Survey, a remarkable mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that recorded land ownership across Ireland in the 1650s, shows no church or chapel at this location in Tyfarnan parish, which raises the possibility that whatever stood here either postdates that survey or escaped its notice entirely. The northern wall of the chapel has been repurposed as the northern boundary wall of the adjoining graveyard, blurring the line between ruin and landscape. Inside what was once the building's interior, a headstone has been placed against that same north wall, directly opposite where the entrance once stood. It belongs to Charles William Lewinge of Levington Park, who died in 1868. The juxtaposition is quietly striking: a memorial stone set inside the bones of a building whose own history has largely dissolved.
The site sits beside a public road that marks the townland boundary with Ballynagall, with a quarry lying to the east. The woodland setting and the ivy growth mean that the ruins read more as a natural feature than an architectural one, easy to overlook if you are not already looking for them.