Church, Knoppoge, Co. Kerry

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Knoppoge, Co. Kerry

Standing vacant in a graveyard in the Kerry townland of Knoppoge, this nineteenth-century church presents a small architectural puzzle.

It is a fairly modest building in plan, a rectangular nave oriented east to west in the traditional manner, yet it carries details that suggest a certain ambition: cut-limestone dressings set against walls of random rubble sandstone, pointed windows along the nave, and a three-light east window of the kind more commonly associated with larger parish churches.

A datestone on the west wall places its construction in 1837, which situates it within the broader wave of church-building that followed Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and coincided with various programmes of Protestant church construction under the Board of First Fruits and its successor bodies. The most conspicuous feature is the three-storey bell tower at the west end, which carries corner buttresses, an embattled parapet, and corner pinnacles. The embattled, or crenellated, parapet is a decorative device borrowed from medieval military architecture, widely used on ecclesiastical buildings of this period to lend an air of antiquity and solidity. A vestry occupies the east end of the north wall, a practical addition that would have served the clergy before and after services. The building is now vacant, its windows no longer filled with light in any functional sense, though the fabric itself appears to survive as a coherent structure within its graveyard setting.

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