Church, Cartroncoragh, Co. Westmeath

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Cartroncoragh, Co. Westmeath

In Drumraney graveyard in County Westmeath, a medieval church has effectively dissolved into its surroundings.

Its stones were cannibalised for a Church of Ireland building in the nineteenth century, that building was pulled down by Westmeath County Council in the early 1940s and its material used for road improvements, and a 2013 clean-up scheme levelled and reseeded the graveyard surface, removing what little topographic evidence remained. The precise location of the original church within the graveyard has never been established. What survives does so in fragments, scattered and repurposed: a round-arched window head lying on the grass in the western quadrant, a finial stone that once supported a gable cross resting near a 1632 graveslab, coping stones from the church gable built into the graveyard wall as a bench, and medieval punch dressed stonework incorporated into a nineteenth-century memorial surround.

The site's history reaches back to at least the sixth century, when St Aed is recorded as having visited Éanán, a hermit attached to the monastery of Druim-rath, the early name for this place in the west of Meath. The community suffered badly in 946, when the Annals of the Four Masters record that a Norse army crossed Druim-raithe and burned the oratory with one hundred and fifty people inside. The Norman presence arrived after 1185, when Sir Henry Dillon, known also as De Lion, was granted lands in the region and built both a church and a castle at Drumraney, establishing what would become known as Dillon's Country. By the ecclesiastical taxation of 1302 to 1306, the church of Drumrath was valued at six marks per year in the diocese of Meath. The 1659 Down Survey map still shows it standing on glebe land of thirty-two plantation acres, a glebe being the land assigned to support a parish church and its incumbent. By 1693, a record describes the building as a church and chancel both ruined, and the historian Cogan later noted bluntly that it had been torn down and a Protestant place of worship built with its materials alongside.

For a visitor, the graveyard itself is the draw rather than any single monument. The older burial ground occupies the southern half, defined by a slight east-west scarp that marks the boundary of an earlier enclosure. Looking carefully among the headstones, window mullions are visible that may have been reused as grave markers. The dedicated eye will find more than the casual glance suggests, even if the church that generated all these fragments has long since been absorbed into the road beneath your feet.

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