Church, Fasagh, Co. Kildare

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Church, Fasagh, Co. Kildare

At the eastern end of a roadside graveyard in Fasagh, County Kildare, the outline of a medieval church has almost entirely dissolved back into the ground. What remains is less a ruin in the conventional sense and more a low, grassed-over ridge of collapsed masonry, barely knee-height in places, tracing a narrow rectangle roughly ten and a half metres long and just over three metres wide. It takes a moment to recognise it for what it is.

The walls, where they survive at all, stand between twenty centimetres and sixty centimetres above the surface, their original width still readable at up to two and a half metres in places. A gap of around one and a half metres along the southern wall marks where the entrance once was. Most striking is a single chamfered arch-stone, partially embedded in the ground at the south-west corner of the interior. A chamfered stone is one whose edge has been cut away at an angle, a finishing detail that signals deliberate craft and suggests the building once had at least one formal architectural element, perhaps a doorway or window surround, of some ambition. That this one fragment survives, half-swallowed by the earth, while everything around it has collapsed to rubble, gives the site an oddly concentrated quality. The interior of the former church now contains burial plots, meaning the ground has continued to hold the dead long after the building ceased to shelter the living.

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Pete F
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