Church, Killahugh, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Killahugh, Co. Westmeath

What remains at Killahugh is essentially a tall rectangular tower being quietly swallowed by ivy, standing on a low natural ridge amid undulating pasture in County Westmeath.

When the site was visited and recorded in 1980, the ivy growth was already so dense that the only feature clearly visible was a single doorway with a pointed arch. Everything else had been absorbed into green. Roughly 210 metres to the north-west lies Rathconrath Motte, a raised earthwork left over from the Norman period, so this small ridge sits within a landscape that has accumulated human traces across many centuries.

The tower itself belongs to a Church of Ireland building that was already marked simply as 'Church' on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. The church it once crowned appears to date from the 18th or 19th century, built on or beside a much older site. The earlier, medieval church ruins lie immediately to the south-east, and were distinguished on older maps by Gothic script, the conventional cartographic shorthand for ancient ecclesiastical remains. Running eastward from the tower's east wall, a low grass-covered wall footing turns south at a right angle to meet what may be the remains of a small chapel, though the relationship between these fragments was uncertain even to those who recorded them. Of the later church, only the tower now survives.

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