Church, Bluebell, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Churches & Chapels
Somewhere between a suburban roundabout and a quiet residential street in Dublin 12, a medieval church ruin sits on a low rise inside a walled graveyard, almost entirely overlooked by the city that has grown around it.
A stream runs along the bottom of the north-facing burial ground, and the whole arrangement has a slightly incongruous quality, as if a fragment of rural County Dublin simply refused to be absorbed. The west gable is the most immediately legible feature from outside the enclosure, rising from a considerable spread of collapsed masonry that extends some five metres around the church's perimeter.
The building was in use as recently as 1547, according to F. E. Ball's 1906 history of County Dublin, and by the time of the Down Survey in 1655 to 1656, it was already being recorded as the ruins of an old chapel. The Down Survey was a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to document land ownership across Ireland, and the Book of Reference compiled alongside it provides some of the earliest documentary evidence for sites like this one. The church itself is a modest structure, measuring roughly 8.5 metres long and 4.4 metres wide internally, built of roughly coursed masonry with notably large blocks and large squared-off quoins at the corners. Entry was through a pointed, segmental west doorway, a form that sits somewhere between the fully Gothic pointed arch and the flatter segmental arch, and the interior was lit by a plain rectangular opening set above the doorway with a deeply splayed embrasure. A single corbel, a projecting stone bracket, survives low on the north wall and gives some sense of how far the interior has fallen.
The graveyard remains enclosed by its original stone wall, which helps to mark the site clearly even if it is easy to pass without noticing. The west gable and the scatter of fallen stonework are the main things to look for once inside the enclosure. The remains of a south jamb from a window survive in the south-east corner, though the surrounding collapse makes reading the building's original form somewhat speculative at ground level. The stream along the lower boundary is worth noting as a likely reason the site was established where it was, water sources being a consistent factor in early ecclesiastical settlement.
