Church, Kilbonane, Co. Cork

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Church, Kilbonane, Co. Cork

One of the more quietly puzzling details about the ruined parish church at Kilbonane is that its finest window can no longer be seen from outside.

The east wall carries a double ogee-headed cusped light, a refined piece of late-medieval stonework with curving, S-shaped profiles meeting at a pointed cusp, and at some point in the nineteenth century a memorial was built directly against the exterior of the wall, blocking it entirely. The window survives inside, visible to anyone who enters, while the outside world has been walled off from it for well over a century.

The building itself is a late-medieval rectangular church, roughly fourteen and a half metres long by just over six metres wide, with walls that still stand to their full height. It sits in the northern half of a graveyard in mid Cork and is entered through a pointed-arch doorway near the western end of the south wall. Just inside that doorway stands a cone-shaped stone stoup, a small basin for holy water, and at the north-east corner there survives a fragment of a plain octagonal font. Closer to the east end of the south wall are two rectangular presses, small recessed cupboards set into the masonry; the western one is partially buried under the accumulated ground level, but its chamfered surround suggests it may once have held a piscina, a liturgical basin used for washing sacred vessels. A shallow rectangular slab projecting from the interior of the east wall adds another layer of detail that resists easy explanation. The church was reported as being in ruins in 1615, yet by 1639 it was recorded as being in repair, and the evidence of that restoration appears to survive in the fabric of the west gable, where the north wall is only loosely bonded to the stonework, pointing to a rebuild rather than original construction. The interior has been used for burial over a long period; the earliest dateable headstone noted there reads 1740.

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