Church (in Ruins), Ardagh, Co. Mayo

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Church (in Ruins), Ardagh, Co. Mayo

At first glance, the old church at Ardagh in County Mayo might appear to be a reasonably well-preserved medieval ruin, its east gable rising to roughly two metres and punctuated by three pointed arched alcoves.

The problem is that none of that eastern wall is medieval at all. What looks like a faithful remnant is, in fact, a modern fabrication built over the original low foundation courses during an unauthorised graveyard clean-up scheme carried out in 2008 and 2009, and the three alcoves it features bear no relationship to whatever the wall originally looked like. The rest of the building was treated with similar enthusiasm: cement mortar was pressed heavily into the joints, the tops of the north and south walls were squared off and sealed over, and the west gable was partially rebuilt. The result is a structure that has been, in a precise and uncomfortable sense, un-ruined.

Before those interventions, the church presented a rather more honest, if fragmentary, picture. When inspected in 1996, it measured 13.3 metres east to west and 6.1 metres north to south, built from medium-sized random limestone rubble laid in mortar on a roughly west-northwest to east-southeast alignment. The west gable still stood to 3.1 metres and was relatively intact, including one notably large upright slab at its south-west corner. The north and south walls reached about 1.3 metres, and a gap of around two metres near the west end of the south wall most likely marked an original doorway. The east gable, by contrast, had already been reduced to scattered remnants no more than 0.4 metres high, which is precisely what made it so vulnerable to the reconstruction that followed. The original fabric of that wall is now concealed beneath the later work, and the building can no longer be read as a medieval structure.

The graveyard in which the church sits continues to be used, and the building's interior retains some older material that the clean-up scheme did not disturb. Three grave plots, roughly defined by low stone settings, run along the inner face of the south wall. Against the north wall, towards its east end, a grave covered by two horizontal stone slabs carries a headstone with an eighteenth-century inscription. These details, quiet and easy to overlook, are now among the more reliable indicators that what surrounds them was once something genuinely old.

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Pete F
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