Church, Carrigathou, Co. Cork
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Beneath a tangle of dumped field-fence material in a tillage field at Carrigathou, a low oblong platform is the only physical remnant of what was once the parish church of Aghinagh.
The site is not ruined in any dramatic sense; it has simply been absorbed, buried under the detritus of agricultural tidying-up, until the church itself is invisible and the ground where it stood reads as nothing more than a slight rise in the soil.
When P. J. Hartnett recorded the site in 1939, he described a raised platform four feet high with an oblong plan measuring 45 by 28 feet, a modest but legible footprint. The Ordnance Survey Name Books had already identified it as the former parish church of Aghinagh, suggesting a community memory of the site that outlasted any standing fabric. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked not only the church but a burial ground immediately to its south and a bullaun stone nearby. A bullaun is a boulder or rock with one or more cup-shaped depressions worn or carved into its surface, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes with folk ritual use continuing long after the church itself fell out of use. Neither the burial ground nor the bullaun stone now shows any surface trace, and the platform Hartnett measured has since disappeared beneath accumulated field clearance material. Three distinct features documented across different periods of recording have each, in turn, become undetectable.