Church (in ruins), Kilcornan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
A medieval parish church sitting in flat grassland within a former landed estate is an unusual combination, and this one at Kilcornan carries an extra layer of oddity: when surveyors examined it in August 1983, it was in the middle of being restored, with a new floor, roof, and windows being inserted into walls that had somehow survived largely intact.
The building is rectangular in plan, running roughly thirteen metres east to west and just over ten metres north to south, its four walls constructed of neatly laid limestone blocks with dressed sandstone quoinstones at the corners. What makes the fabric particularly legible is the detail that survives: a pointed arch doorway in the south wall, single-light transitional windows at the east end, and two small rectangular windows stacked one above the other in the west gable. Those upper windows, read alongside beam slots cut into both side walls, indicate that a loft once occupied this western end of the church, a feature that speaks to how the space was actually used rather than simply how it looked.
The site sits within the former demesne of Kilcornan House, and its history is tangled up with the Redington family, the estate's former owners. A cross outside the church, its base still at the east end, was erected by the Redingtons in 1899. Inside the church there were once other devotional objects gathered from elsewhere: a stone plaque depicting the Assumption, originally from Lavally House, and a small font and holy-oil slab also said to derive from Lavally. The plaque has since been moved and is now housed in the porch of the Catholic church in Clarinbridge, a few kilometres to the south. A possible graveyard is associated with the church site, and roughly 310 metres to the north-north-east there is a castle site, suggesting this corner of east Galway was once a good deal more populated and organised than its present quiet grassland setting implies.