Church in ruins, Crosserdree, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Churches & Chapels

Church in ruins, Crosserdree, Co. Westmeath

What remains of the medieval church at Crosserdree amounts to a few stubborn sections of wall, draped in ivy and barely shoulder-height, set within a sub-rectangular graveyard that itself sits at the centre of a wider landscape still faintly marked by the activities of whoever once lived and worked here.

The ruin is modest almost to the point of invisibility, yet the detail still legible in its stonework makes it quietly absorbing. Most telling is a doorway in the north wall, flat-headed and barely 62 centimetres wide by 65 centimetres tall, that connects the main body of the church to a small rectangular annexe at its north-east angle. Whether this room served a liturgical or a more practical purpose is unclear, but a blocked window opening is still visible in the surviving section of its east wall.

The church itself measures roughly 12.4 metres by 6.2 metres externally, with walls nearly a metre thick, aligned on a west-north-west to east-south-east axis in the manner typical of medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings. The east and west walls have been reduced to low footings, but short upstanding sections of the north and south walls survive to between two and two and a half metres. A single flat-headed window remains intact in the south wall near the east end. Lying on the ground in the interior, broken but recognisable, is a fragment of a medieval font, the stone basin used for baptism, now dislodged from whatever setting it once occupied and left resting on the surface. About 85 metres to the west-north-west lies a possible castle site, and the earthworks spreading to the south, east, and north-east of the graveyard may be contemporaneous with both structures. A double linear earthwork in the field to the north has been interpreted as a former roadway connecting the castle site to the church, while meandering earthworks in the same field suggest an old watercourse. Cultivation ridges in the field to the east hint at a settled agricultural community that once surrounded all of this.

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