Church, Clogheen, Co. Cork
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Churches & Chapels
A church that was abandoned before the eighteenth century was half over leaves very little to show for itself, and the former Church of Ireland parish church of Caherduggan at Clogheen in north Cork is no exception.
What remains amounts to a single standing corner, the north-west angle rising to just over three metres, with short returns of the west and north walls extending a few metres in each direction. The south wall has collapsed almost entirely into a low line of rubble, with only scattered facing stones to suggest it was ever a dressed surface. The building was rectangular, roughly twenty metres east to west and ten metres north to south, constructed from random-rubble limestone, the uncut or loosely shaped stonework typical of vernacular building in the region. At the east end, where the chancel would have stood, a family grave plot enclosed by a low narrow wall was laid out in 1817, long after the building itself had ceased to function.
According to Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, the church was erected during the reign of Charles II, placing its construction somewhere between 1660 and 1685. It served the parish of Caherduggan for a relatively brief period. By 1717 the roof had been removed and services discontinued, meaning the building was effectively derelict within a generation or two of its completion. The graveyard in which it sits is older than the church itself; another ecclesiastical site of earlier date lies within the same ground, suggesting this was a place of burial and worship long before the Restoration-era building was raised over it.
