Church, Gortroe (Connello Lower By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Churches & Chapels
The east wall of this ruined church in County Limerick has been gone since at least 1840, and no one seems to have thought much of it since.
What remains stands in the north-west corner of a graveyard at Gortroe, its limestone walls rising to their full original height yet so thoroughly encased in ivy that the stonework beneath is largely invisible. The effect is less ruin than green architecture, a shell that has been quietly colonised over the decades while the graveyard around it continued its own slow work.
The building is identified as the remains of the parish church of Cloncoura, recorded as such by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1904 and 1905. It was built from uncoursed limestone blocks set in lime mortar, and its surviving interior measures roughly 6.2 metres north to south and 14.55 metres east to west, though the missing east wall means that full original length is a matter of estimation. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 noted that the east wall had already vanished by the time surveyors reached it, so its loss is not recent. The church's most legible feature is a doorway near the west end of the south wall, later medieval in character. Its outer edge is chamfered and it carries a two-centred pointed arch, the kind of pointed arch common in Gothic ecclesiastical building from the thirteenth century onwards. On the inside, the doorway is square-set rather than arched, and is covered by a flat vault formed over a wicker centring, a technique in which wet mortar was laid over a temporary frame of woven branches, which was removed once the mortar cured. A large, well-cut hanging eye, the socket into which a door pivot would have been fitted, survives on the west jamb. The lower jamb-stones have been missing since the 1840s, and the gap has been filled, somewhat bluntly, with concrete.
The church sits within a graveyard that remains in use, so access is generally straightforward, though the site itself rewards a slow approach. The ivy covering the walls is dense enough to obscure most of the stonework, which makes the doorway, projecting clearly from the south wall, all the more striking by contrast. The concrete repair around the lower jambs is hard to miss and worth examining alongside the original chamfered limestone above it, the two interventions sitting in uncomfortable proximity across a gap of roughly a century and a half.