Church in ruins, Balreagh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Churches & Chapels
In the centre of Balreagh graveyard in County Westmeath, a medieval church has all but disappeared into the ground.
The building once measured roughly eight metres north to south and over seventeen metres east to west, large enough to have served a substantial community, yet today the walls are so thoroughly consumed by grass and vegetation that the doorways and a possible window opening, all recorded in earlier surveys, are no longer visible at all. What remains upstanding amounts to little more than the lowest three courses of stone, a faint rectangular outline pressing up through the turf.
The site sits on rising ground, and about eighty metres to the west stands a motte, the flat-topped earthen mound characteristic of early Norman defensive architecture. The proximity of these two features suggests this part of Westmeath was once a place of some local significance, with ecclesiastical and military functions operating in close relationship. Aerial photographs taken between 1968 and 1970 recorded cultivation earthworks in the ground between the motte and the graveyard, traces of former field activity that are difficult to read at ground level but which hint at a landscape that was once far more intensively worked and organised than it appears today. The photographs themselves predate the period when such survey work became routine, which makes them a useful early record of a cluster of monuments that have since continued to erode and settle further into the soil.