Church, Ballyeightragh, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Ballyeightragh, Co. Cork

What survives of this medieval church at Ballyeightragh is almost entirely underground, or at least beneath the grass.

The foundations, rising no more than a metre above the soil, trace the outline of a rectangular building roughly eighteen metres long and seven and a half metres wide, with a smaller annexe attached to the northern end of the west wall. That annexe, about seven and a half metres by three and a half, may have served a liturgical or administrative function, though the sod now covers everything so thoroughly that the site reads more as a series of low, grassy ridges than as any recognisable structure.

This was the parish church of Clonmult, a name that still attaches to the broader area in east Cork. By 1615 it was already recorded as being in ruins, a detail noted by Brady in the mid-nineteenth century, which suggests the building fell out of use well before the upheavals of the seventeenth century had fully run their course. Yet the graveyard around it continued to receive the dead long after the church itself was abandoned. Burials found within the walls of the church date from the mid-eighteenth century, meaning that families were still choosing to lay their relatives inside the footprint of the old ruin, perhaps because proximity to consecrated stonework, even collapsed stonework, carried a significance that outlasted the institution itself.

The site sits near the northern end of the graveyard, which places the church foundations slightly apart from the main body of later graves. Visitors who know what to look for will notice the low rectangular mounding of the turf where the walls once stood, and the slightly more pronounced outline where the annexe extends to the north-west corner.

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