Church, Ballycoog, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
On a gently sloping hillside in Ballycoog, County Wicklow, the remains of a small rectangular chapel sit without the usual markers of an ecclesiastical site.
There is no enclosing wall, no graveyard, no ring of raised ground to suggest burials nearby. Just the shell of a building, uncoursed rubble defining its western end, the eastern wall reduced to little more than a foundation course, and a blocked doorway in the north wall that no one has passed through in a very long time.
The building is modest in its dimensions, roughly eight metres from east to west and under four metres wide internally, which would have made for a tight congregation. Two windows survive, one in the western gable with a low arch, and one at the western end of the southern wall. The detail that makes the place quietly unusual is in the fabric of those windows: red brick, the kind of material that announces a later intervention into an older structure. Local tradition holds that the chapel was restored in the 1780s, and the brick bears that out, a Georgian patch on what is presumably a much older form. Inside the ruined walls, set 1.1 metres above floor level, is a square niche between the blocked doorway and the western wall, the sort of recess that might once have held a statue or a devotional object. By 1838, when the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile, the building was already being recorded as a Roman Catholic chapel in ruins, which suggests the 1780s restoration bought it only a short period of further use before it fell silent again.