Church, Aghada, Co. Cork

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Church, Aghada, Co. Cork

In Upper Aghada, a two-storey embattled bell tower stands largely alone, the last surviving element of a cruciform church that was demolished in the late 1980s.

It is a curious kind of monument, a fragment that outlasted its parent building by decades, and its continued presence gives the site an oddly incomplete quality, like a single word remaining from a longer sentence.

The church it once served was built on a north-south axis and followed a cruciform plan, with galleries in both transepts and at the southern end of the nave. Its window openings were pointed, a feature associated with Gothic Revival ecclesiastical architecture, though the sash windows incorporated switch line tracery, a form of intersecting bar work that softens the gothic vocabulary with something a little more restrained. The embattled bell tower, added to the southern end, gave the building a castellated profile that was fashionable in Irish church design of the nineteenth century. When the main body of the church was taken down in the late 1980s, the tower was left standing, preserved while the rest was lost.

The tower today is the only physical clue that a substantial church once occupied this spot in east Cork. Visitors who know what to look for will notice how its battlemented parapet, designed to crown a building of some scale, now sits in isolation, stripped of the architectural context that once gave it meaning.

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Pete F
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