Church, Delgany, Co. Wicklow

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Delgany, Co. Wicklow

In Delgany village, on a south-facing slope above a stream valley, the remains of an old nave-and-chancel church sit within a trapezoidal graveyard that holds centuries of accumulated burials.

The building was still in active use until around 1789, which means it served the local community into the era of the United Irishmen and just before the upheaval of 1798. What makes the site quietly remarkable is not the ruin itself, which survives only at lower levels, but what stands to its north: the lower shaft of a granite high cross, nearly two metres tall, with chamfered edges and the ghostly remains of decorative panels on three of its faces. On the south face, six lines of inscription survive, though they have resisted all attempts at reading.

High crosses, typically elaborately carved free-standing stone monuments associated with early Christian monasticism in Ireland, are relatively common in their complete form, but surviving fragments with partial script are rarer and more tantalising. The Delgany shaft was noted by the scholar Peter Harbison in his 1992 study of Irish high crosses, though the inscription remains indecipherable. The church itself is built of uncoursed rubble, with noticeably larger blocks used towards the wall footings and in the chancel, whose walls at one metre thick are considerably more substantial than the nave walls at 0.75 metres. A single stone projecting from the north wall of the nave is thought to mark the original junction between the two sections. A subrectangular baptismal font, displaced from its original position, now forms part of a low wall beside the doorway, and patches of plaster still cling to the inner face of the nave.

The graveyard, enclosed by a nineteenth-century wall, contains headstones ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1800s, with some placed inside the roofless church itself. The doorway in the south wall retains its large flagstone sill, and there is evidence of a window directly opposite in the north wall, suggesting the original interior was lit from both sides. The cross shaft, standing to the north of the church, is the piece worth pausing over longest: the rebated panels that once framed carvings, and those six silent lines of script, point to a history on this slope that begins well before any date the headstones can offer.

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