Church, Ballymaghroe, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
On a south-facing slope above the Vartry River in County Wicklow, a small ruined church survives in a state that raises more questions than it answers.
Despite walls still standing to around a metre in height, the structure shows no trace of a doorway or windows, which is unusual even for a ruin of this age. Whatever openings once existed have either collapsed entirely or were somehow built over, leaving a shell of uncoursed rubble, roughly 12.5 metres long and just over 5 metres wide, that offers almost no clue as to how people once entered or moved through it.
The church follows a nave and chancel plan, a common arrangement in early and medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings where a rectangular nave for the congregation connects to a smaller chancel reserved for the altar and clergy. It sits within an enclosure defined by an earth and stone bank roughly 3 metres wide, and this enclosure may predate the church itself, suggesting the site had some significance before the standing structure was built. By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their 6-inch map, the outline appeared as a square enclosure, already presumably ruinous. The graveyard within the railings contains a number of headstones dating to the late eighteenth century, so the site was still in use for burial at that period even if the church was no longer functioning. Iron railings now enclose much of the site, though a modern fence cuts across the southern side, a quiet collision of eras that does nothing to resolve the ambiguity of the place.
