Church, Farranavarrigane, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Farranavarrigane, Co. Cork

Ivy has been colonising the walls of this late-medieval church for a very long time.

The parish church of Macloneigh, sitting on the northern edge of a graveyard at Farranavarrigane in mid-Cork, has been in ruins since at least 1700, and the vegetation has had ample time to establish itself. Yet despite centuries of neglect, most of the walls still stand close to their original height, making the building an unusually legible ruin, a rectangular shell roughly 27 metres long and just under 8 metres wide, with enough fabric surviving to read the shape of its former life in some detail.

The most arresting feature is the east window, or what remains of it. The embrasure has largely collapsed, but the light itself survives: a double round-headed opening beneath a simple tracery head made up of two comma-shaped forms flanking an elongated vertical oval with pointed ends. It is probably 16th-century in style, belonging to a period when Irish ecclesiastical architecture was absorbing late Gothic decorative conventions in modest, localised ways. Inside, the window is flanked by two small niches with pointed heads, likely used to hold devotional objects or candles. Elsewhere around the interior, small lintelled wall presses, shallow rectangular recesses built into the masonry, can be found at the south end of the east wall, the east end of the south wall, and in the north-east corner. These were practical fixtures, used to store liturgical vessels or other objects associated with the celebration of Mass. Near the east end of the north wall, a doorway has been blocked up, its pointed arch still facing inward. The south wall preserves the remains of the main doorway near its west end, along with two further gaps that indicate where windows once sat. The north wall, by contrast, has almost entirely fallen away.

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