Church, Kilnadur, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Kilnadur, Co. Cork

By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of West Cork at six inches to the mile, the chapel at Kilnadur was already a ruin.

The surveyors recorded it plainly as "R.C. Chapel (in ruins)", which means it had fallen out of use before the Great Famine, before Catholic Emancipation had fully reshaped the landscape of Irish worship, possibly long before either. That the building was already gone while the country around it was still being formally measured and named gives it a particular quality of absence.

What survives roadside is a small rectangular shell, measuring roughly 6.9 metres along its longer axis and 4 metres across internally, with walls still standing to about 1.8 metres. The masonry is relatively slight, just under 60 centimetres thick, consistent with a modest rural chapel of the penal or immediately post-penal era, when Catholic congregations across Ireland built plain, unadorned structures with few architectural pretensions. The layout follows a straightforward logic: the entrance was through the south-west wall, and the altar sat at the north-east end, where two narrow windows with flat lintelled heads would have drawn in whatever light the orientation allowed. Lintelled windows, in which a single horizontal stone spans the opening rather than an arch, were common in vernacular religious buildings of this period, simple to construct and requiring no specialist stonework.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Church, Kilnadur, Co. Cork. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement