Church, Garryvoe, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
Ivy has done its best to reclaim this late medieval church on the northern edge of Garryvoe, but the walls still stand close to their full height, which is itself something of an anomaly for a building that was already described as ruinous by 1774.
The shell measures roughly seventeen metres east to west and just under eight metres north to south, and enough of its fittings survive inside to give a clear sense of how the interior was once arranged.
The architectural detail is quietly remarkable for a rural parish church. The entrance, set near the western end of the south wall, is framed by a roundly pointed stone arch, and the windows throughout are ogee-headed, meaning their arches curve outward into a gentle S-shape before meeting at a point, a form characteristic of late medieval Irish ecclesiastical work. The east gable retains a two-light version of this window, though its central mullion is gone, and single-light ogee windows survive near the eastern end of both the north and south walls. A flat-headed attic window sits at the centre of the west gable. Inside, a piscina, the small stone basin used for rinsing sacred vessels during Mass, survives in a recessed pointed arch near the eastern end of the south wall. Wall presses, essentially built-in stone cupboards used for storing liturgical objects, remain at the east end of the north wall and the south end of the east wall. In front of the east window are the very ruined remains of a stone altar, and a small projecting stone on the inside face of the east wall, noted by the antiquarian Coleman in 1913, may once have supported a statue. The church was recorded as being in repair in 1615, which places its active life well into the post-Reformation period, making its subsequent collapse into ruin within the following century and a half all the more abrupt.