Church, Aglish, Co. Cork

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Church, Aglish, Co. Cork

What remains of the parish church of Aglish in County Cork is largely a question of ivy.

Two fragments of wall, a north face running some 18.4 metres and a west gable of just over 7 metres, are so thoroughly covered in the plant that the architectural details recorded by earlier observers have since disappeared entirely behind it. A pointed window that had already been blocked up "at an early period", a small rectangular recess in the north wall, and two narrow square-headed windows on the west gable, all noted by Hartnett in 1939, are now invisible beneath the growth. The building was a ruin before anyone now living can imagine, and has been quietly returning to the earth ever since.

The church had fallen out of use well before the seventeenth century. It is recorded as ruinous from at least 1615, and by 1700 the south wall had collapsed entirely, leaving only the north and west standing, and even their junction survives now only at foundation level. The structure sits near the centre of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that in Ireland frequently marks a monastic or early Christian foundation predating any standing stonework. The west wall carries an odd detail on its exterior: a series of projecting stones set close to either corner, positioned as though intended to bond into some further structure that was either never built or has since vanished without trace. Inside, two chest tombs are built directly against the west gable wall, and a headstone dated 1798 survives in what was once the interior of the nave, a reminder that the roofless shell continued to serve as a place of burial long after it ceased to function as a church.

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