Church, Castlemacadam, Co. Wicklow

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Castlemacadam, Co. Wicklow

On a level spur of land overlooking the Avoca valley in County Wicklow, there are two churches, one abandoned and one entirely invisible.

The older of the two has vanished so completely that nothing remains above ground, yet its existence was still being mapped as recently as the mid-nineteenth century, recorded on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a plain rectangular structure. That it existed at all is now easier to infer from what surrounds its absence than from anything on the surface itself.

The vanished church sat roughly sixty metres south-west of a nineteenth-century church that has itself since been abandoned, a quiet doubling of disuse on the same hillside. The graveyard that persists on the site is quadrangular in plan, enclosed by a modern stone wall, and contains headstones dating from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The road that curves around the perimeter of the burial ground may preserve something older than either church: its arc is thought to follow the line of the original ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of curving boundary that in Irish contexts often predates the buildings it surrounded by centuries. Where the church itself once stood, the ground gives nothing away.

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