Church, Ballynora, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Ballynora, Co. Cork

A T-shaped Roman Catholic chapel in a subrectangular churchyard is an unusual combination, and the church at Ballynora in County Cork presents exactly that quiet architectural curiosity.

The T-plan, with its long axis running north to south, is a form associated with Catholic chapel-building in Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when congregations were growing and the layout allowed more worshippers to gather within sight of the altar than a simple rectangular nave would permit. The bellcote sits on the north gable, and pointed windows punctuate the east walls, while a sacristy extends to the south.

The church was already established by 1842, when the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it plainly as a Roman Catholic chapel. That survey, one of the most ambitious cartographic projects of its era in Ireland, captured the building at a moment when Catholic ecclesiastical architecture was beginning to grow more confident following Catholic Emancipation in 1829. A more recent rectangular graveyard has since been added on the west side, extending the site beyond its older subrectangular enclosure and giving the place a layered quality common to churchyards that have been in continuous use across generations.

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