Church, Castletownsend, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
The Church of Ireland building that watches over Castletownshend from high ground carries more inside it than its plain exterior suggests.
The oak holy table and the carved reredos, the decorative screen or panelling set behind the altar, are said to have come not from this building at all, but from an older parish church at Castlehaven, brought here and given a second life in the chancel.
The present structure dates to 1827, itself a replacement for an earlier church that had stood on the same elevated site since 1761. The 1827 building follows a fairly conventional arrangement for a Protestant parish church of that period: a rectangular nave with a baptistry and vestry to the north, a chancel to the east, and a pinnacled tower to the west. The pinnacles are a small flourish, pointing upward at the corners of the tower in a manner common to the Gothic Revival sensibility that was beginning to influence ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland at the time.
