Church, Ballymagooly, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Ballymagooly, Co. Cork

Sitting at the centre of an overgrown and disused graveyard in Ballymagooly, the former parish church of Rahan presents a quietly contradictory face.

Built with some architectural ambition, its roofless limestone shell now stands largely sealed off from the outside world, its openings blocked and its interior visible only in glimpses through gaps in the masonry, where wall plaques can still be made out on the internal surfaces. The combination of a chimney stack rising from the centre of the north wall and an apparently ornamental blind window beside it, its arch formed in brick rather than the random-rubble limestone of the rest of the structure, gives the building an oddly domestic quality for a place of worship.

The church was built in 1792, according to Brady's 1863 account, to serve the parish of Rahan. The nave is laid out on an east-west axis, as is conventional in Christian church architecture, and the south wall is punctuated by three triple-lancet windows, a grouping that would once have let considerable light into the interior. To the west, a tower carries a four-centred arched doorway, the arch form being a late medieval motif that was still commonly used in ecclesiastical and vernacular buildings well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The surrounding graveyard, roughly forty metres north to south and fifty metres east to west, has its own quiet chronology: the earliest legible headstones date from the early nineteenth century, placing the first burials there shortly after the church itself was completed. Neither the graveyard nor the church is in active use any longer, and both have been reclaimed to a significant degree by vegetation.

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