Church, Dragoonhill, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
A church perched on a low, steep-sided knoll in County Wicklow might seem unremarkable until you look closely at what it contains.
Set into the graveyard is a tapering granite slab, measuring just over a metre in length, which has been re-erected as a headstone. Carved onto its face is an equal-armed Maltese cross on a narrow stem, defined by a shallow groove in the stone. Nearby, a small disc-headed granite cross bearing a date that begins 166 and then trails off into illegibility once stood in the same ground. Inside the church itself, there is a granite mortar or piscina, a small stone basin used for the ritual washing of sacred vessels, fitted with four projecting lugs. These are modest objects individually, but together they suggest a site that accumulated layers of devotional use across several centuries.
The church as it now stands is possibly of 17th-century construction, but the ground beneath it has a longer story. A medieval church on this site was recorded as early as 1219 to 1228, when it belonged to the convent of Timolin, a house of Arroasian canonesses in County Kildare. The graveslab is dated to the 16th or 17th century, and the disc-headed cross may be contemporary with the present building. The site also formed part of the medieval borough of Hollywood, a settlement whose broader archaeology includes a cluster of related monuments in the surrounding area. The combination of a convent's outlying church, a carved Maltese cross slab, and a liturgical stone vessel surviving in situ is unusual enough to make Dragoonhill worth more than a passing glance.