Church, Knockmore Eighter, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
In the south-east corner of a working field in Knockmore Eighter, Co. Mayo, a small stone ruin sits half-swallowed by overgrowth, its purpose now easy to miss entirely.
What looks at first glance like a collapsed field boundary or a forgotten outbuilding was, within living memory of earlier generations, a place of worship.
The structure is rectangular, running roughly nine to ten metres east-north-east to west-south-west and around four to four and a half metres across, built from stone sometime in the nineteenth century for use as a church. It is modest even by the standards of rural Irish ecclesiastical buildings of that period, when Catholic emancipation and the gradual rebuilding of parish infrastructure saw small, plain churches appear across the west of Ireland, often on marginal land and with minimal ornament. This one has not fared well against time and vegetation, and the thicket that now surrounds it has done as much to preserve its outline as to obscure it.
