Church, Aghada, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
A ruined church that was already falling apart within living memory of its own construction is an odd thing to encounter, and the one sitting in the old graveyard at Upper Aghada has that slightly paradoxical quality.
The rectangular shell, measuring just over eighteen metres east to west and six metres north to south, retains much of its fabric: tall, slightly-splayed window openings in the north and south walls, a matching window at the centre of the east end, a blocked attic window in the west gable, and two doorways, one in the north wall and one in the west, both now blocked. The proportions and detailing all read as eighteenth century, yet the building had slipped into ruin by 1842, when it was recorded as such on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. That is a short arc from construction to collapse.
The history behind it is a little tangled. In 1710, an Act of Parliament gave permission for the parish to build a new church in a more convenient location. Rather than acting on that provision, the parish instead erected the present building at around the same time, placing it within what was already an ancient graveyard at Aghada. It was still in a serviceable state in 1774, but the congregation had moved on by 1817, when a new church was built on a different site roughly three hundred metres to the north-west. The old building was left behind. Inside the roofless walls, headstones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crowd the interior, the earliest among them dating from 1819, meaning burial continued here even after the structure itself had been abandoned. One small detail complicates the otherwise uniform eighteenth-century character: at the base of the east window, part of an arch stone survives that belongs to a door surround of late medieval character, a fragment suggesting the site has a longer ecclesiastical history than the standing walls alone would imply.
