Church, Cloghran, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Churches & Chapels
At Cloghran, in north County Dublin, a quiet graveyard holds the remains of not one but two vanished churches, layered on top of each other in the way that Irish ecclesiastical sites so often are.
Neither survives above ground in any meaningful sense. The earlier of the two is represented by foundation remains tucked to the north-east of the graveyard, while the later building, an early eighteenth-century parish church, has been reduced to a low, grassed-over platform sitting in the centre of the burial ground. Without knowing what you are looking at, you could walk across both without registering that anything was there at all.
The medieval church is the more intriguing of the two, not least because of the claim attached to its origins. According to local tradition, it was erected by Ryryd, son of Owain, Prince of Wales, a connection that, if accurate, would place its founding in the medieval period and link it to the movements of Welsh nobility into Ireland, something that occurred in the wake of the Norman presence in both islands. The church was noted as being in reasonable condition as late as 1630, which suggests it remained in use well into the post-Reformation period before eventually falling out of service. The Fingal Historic Graveyards project, which recorded the site in 2008, documented both phases of construction, drawing on the work of researchers including Geraldine Stout and Christine Baker.
Cloghran is a small townland situated near Dublin Airport, which means the surrounding landscape is not especially rural in character, though the graveyard itself retains a degree of quiet. Visitors looking for the early medieval foundations should head to the north-east section of the site, where the structural remains are recorded under the reference DU014-009002. The grassed-over platform of the eighteenth-century church is more centrally placed and easier to locate, though it reads as little more than a slight rise in the ground. The site is a working graveyard, so a degree of care and consideration is appropriate when moving around to examine the older features.
