Church, Ballyclogh, Co. Cork

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Church, Ballyclogh, Co. Cork

A three-storey embattled tower, Y-tracery windows, a timber gallery still intact on the west wall, and memorial tablets lining the nave; the former Church of Ireland parish church at Ballyclough in north Cork has all the architectural credentials of an active place of worship.

What it actually houses now is a garage. A wide doorway cut into the north wall of the nave makes the conversion plain enough, though the rest of the building, with its random-rubble limestone walls under render and its gabled chancel to the east, still reads clearly as a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival church.

The congregation that first gathered here in 1829 numbered up to 230 persons, a reasonably substantial attendance for a rural north Cork parish. The building was enlarged just two years later, in 1831, and then underwent a more thorough overhaul between 1874 and 1875, when a chancel was added to the east end along with a new roof, new floor, new windows, and a heating system. The Y-tracery in the windows, a form in which the window's central bar forks near the top into a Y shape, is characteristic of the Gothic Revival taste that was fashionable for Church of Ireland buildings throughout the nineteenth century. A short distance to the west, around 200 metres away, stands the Ballyclough Glebe House, built in 1824, five years before the church itself. A glebe house was the official residence of the Church of Ireland rector, and this one is a neat three-bay, two-storey building over a basement to the rear, with a hipped roof, a central door porch on its south-east-facing entrance front, and two off-centre chimneys.

The church sits on the north side of the graveyard, aligned roughly west-south-west to east-north-east along the street. Visitors approaching it will find the exterior largely legible despite the change of use, and the tower in particular remains a prominent landmark. The interior memorials and the wooden west gallery are, by the nature of things, now in a rather different context than their makers intended.

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