Church, Killiskey, Co. Wicklow

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Killiskey, Co. Wicklow

A cylindrical granite font resting against the wall of a graveyard, no longer inside any church, is one of those quietly dislocating sights that prompts questions about everything that has disappeared around it.

At Killiskey in County Wicklow, the roofless outline of a medieval church sits at the centre of a quadrangular graveyard, its north wall and west gable still largely standing while the rest has sunk to foundation level. The south wall of the enclosure follows a gentle curve, an irregularity that hints at older boundaries absorbed into the present layout.

The church's origins are tied to the Archbishop of Dublin's manor of Castlekevin, which held these lands at the start of the thirteenth century. Between 1212 and 1225, Archbishop Henry de Loundres granted both the church and its associated lands to the Priory of St Thomas's, an Augustinian house located outside Dublin. De Loundres was one of the more energetic ecclesiastical administrators of his era in Ireland, and this grant was part of a broader pattern of endowing religious houses with rural churches and their revenues. The building itself is modest in scale, a simple rectangle measuring just under 22 metres internally in length and a little over 5 metres in width, with walls roughly 84 centimetres thick. A pointed arch doorway in the south wall was noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters, those nineteenth-century field observations compiled by scholars travelling the country, suggesting the opening was still legible enough to describe at that point.

The graveyard remains in use, enclosed now by a modern stone wall, and the font sits near the west gable of the ruin. Baptismal fonts in this position, outside or at the edge of a ruined nave, are not uncommon in Irish churchyards where the building itself has long since lost its roof; the font outlasts the institution it served and ends up marooned among headstones.

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