Church, Carrigpark, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Carrigpark, Co. Cork

The roofless shell of the former Church of Ireland parish church of Carrigamleary sits along the northern boundary of its own graveyard in north County Cork, a curious detail that hints at the layered, compressed history of the site.

Inside the rectangular nave, roughly twelve metres long, there is a fireplace set into the interior north wall, flanked by windows with thin pointed lights and lattice glazing. A fireplace in a church is unusual enough to stop you short; it speaks to the modest, domestic scale of a building that was never grand, never had a tower, and was dismantled within forty years of being completed.

The present ruin was the third iteration of worship on or near this spot. The medieval parish church stood about five hundred metres to the south, in Carrig Demesne. A church at Carrig was consecrated in 1715, most likely the first building on this particular site. Then, in 1837, the topographer Samuel Lewis noted that its replacement was a neat small church in the later English style, then still under construction, with part of the earlier walls to be incorporated into the new fabric. That new building was reported to be in order in 1860, which makes its fate all the more abrupt: it was dismantled in 1899, leaving the pointed windows, their hood mouldings and block-and-start limestone surrounds, and that incongruous internal fireplace to weather quietly into the present. The quoins on the south corner have since been removed, adding another small subtraction to a building that already had more taken from it than most.

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Pete F
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