Church, Carroward West, Co. Limerick

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Carroward West, Co. Limerick

The old parish church at Carroward West presents a particular kind of puzzle: a building so thoroughly absorbed by its own graveyard that it is difficult, standing inside the ruins, to say where the architecture ends and the burial ground begins.

The interior is completely filled with burial plots, the earliest recorded headstone dated 1766 and located near the north-east corner, and the walls that once enclosed this space have been further disrupted by the insertion of a burial vault into the north wall, splitting it into two surviving sections with a gap at the centre.

The church served as the parish church of Dromcolliher, and what remains are fragmentary ivy-clad walls built of roughly coursed stone blocks. By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded it (vol. 2, pp. 21–2), the building was already described as rectangular in plan but the west gable had already fallen. At that point, surveyors could still make out an east window with a single pointed light, and two heavily damaged windows in the south wall, though no doorway was apparent even then. The north wall, estimated at an original length of around 25 metres, has since lost its north-east corner, and it remains unclear whether the current west end of that wall is original. The east wall has lost both ends and is now largely masked by ivy, though a gap of roughly 0.9 metres near its eastern end may represent the position of a former window.

The ruins sit at the centre of the graveyard, which means access involves walking among active and historic burial plots. The ivy cover is substantial, and much of the wall fabric is obscured at any time of year, though the structure of the surviving north and south walls is easier to read in winter when growth dies back a little. The internal width of the church was approximately 6.5 metres, and standing within the outline of those walls, with the burial plots pressing up to every surface, gives a clear sense of how completely the living use of the building has been replaced by a different kind of occupation.

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