Church, Aghanagh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Churches & Chapels
A burial vault blocked by a late medieval graveslab, a font that has since vanished, and a doorway whose rounded arch appears to have been added long after the original walls were raised: the ruined parish church at Aghanagh, on the northern shore of Ballinafad Bay overlooking Lough Arrow, accumulates small mysteries in the way that long-used sites tend to do.
Its east wall is gone entirely, ivy smothers much of what remains, and the interior has been overtaken by dense scrub, yet the three surviving walls still stand to around three metres, their random-rubble limestone construction largely intact after several centuries.
The tradition that a church was founded here by St Patrick places the site within a very old layer of Irish ecclesiastical geography, though the fabric visible today is that of the medieval parish church of Aghanagh. By 1847, when the antiquarian Wood-Martin recorded the site, a late medieval graveslab was already blocking the opening of the burial vault beneath the south wall window, and a second similar slab was noted nearby. Wood-Martin also observed a broken baptismal font just inside the doorway, a detail recorded again in his 1882 publication; that font has not been located since. The north wall doorway, with its limestone surround in two plain orders and a rounded arch, was documented by Wakeman in 1885 to 1886, who considered it probably an insertion into the earlier fabric. A cross-inscribed stone lies to the southeast of the ruin, and architectural fragments from the site have been gathered into a pile within the interior.
Directly across the lane to the north sits a rectangular enclosure that local tradition identifies as a children's burial ground, known in Irish as a cillín, a type of informal burial place historically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. The proximity of the two sites, the medieval parish church and the cillín, separated only by a road, is not unusual in Ireland but gives the spot a particular layering of use and memory that repays quiet attention.