Church, Inchanappa, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
In a small graveyard at Inchanappa in County Wicklow, the remains of a medieval church sit in a state of considerable decay.
What makes it worth a second look is not its scale, which is modest at roughly nine metres by five and a half, but what survives among the broken headstones: a rectangular font, the kind of stone basin used for holding baptismal water, lying damaged but still present in the burial ground rather than inside any standing structure.
The church follows a nave and chancel plan, a common arrangement in Irish medieval ecclesiastical architecture where a rectangular nave for the congregation connects to a smaller chancel at the eastern end reserved for the clergy and altar. The headstones within the graveyard were noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century project in which scholars recorded local antiquities, place names, and oral traditions parish by parish; this particular record was published by O'Flanagan in 1928. The broken font was separately documented by Price in 1959, suggesting the site attracted at least occasional scholarly attention across different generations, even as the fabric of the building itself continued to deteriorate.
