Church, Kilcarra, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
At Kilcarra in County Wicklow, what survives of an old church is less a building than a memory of one.
The eastern end of a rectangular structure still rises from the ground, its rubble foundations reaching roughly a metre in height and sitting on a low plinth, but the rest has long since disappeared into the landscape. What remains measures only around six metres in length, yet the interior width of just over six metres suggests the original building was broader than it was long at this surviving section, which gives some sense of how much has been lost.
The ruins sit in the north-eastern corner of a graveyard that has outlasted the church itself, as graveyards in Ireland so often do. The burial ground is roughly rectangular, about fifty metres along its longer axis, and is bounded by an earthen bank with drystone facing, a simple but durable method of enclosure that has kept its shape for centuries. The entrance at the south-west is marked by a pair of granite pillars, giving the site a quiet formality despite its ruinous state. Inside the church remains, a number of eighteenth-century headstones have been placed or have accumulated over time, so the interior of what was once a roofed space now functions as part of the graveyard it once presided over. The gentle eastward slope of the ground beneath the site is typical of early church positioning in Ireland, where an east-facing orientation carried both practical and liturgical significance.