Church, Lackeen, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Lackeen, Co. Cork

A roofless rectangular shell in County Cork, the old parish church of Lackeen had already been abandoned for over a century and a half before anyone thought to write its ruin into the record.

By 1615 it was out of use, and by 1774 it was already described as ruinous, a trajectory that left it to quietly dissolve into the landscape of north Cork over the following centuries.

What survives today gives a reasonable impression of the building's original proportions: roughly eleven and a half metres long and just over six metres wide internally, it is a modest but solidly conceived structure. The east gable is the most legible part of the ruin, standing to around four and a half metres at its southern end before dropping sharply to little more than a metre at the north side. The south wall also retains some height toward the east, where a roughly blocked opening nearly two metres wide extends to the full height of the surviving masonry; it may represent an original window ope, though its present form makes a precise reading difficult. The north wall has largely collapsed to rubble, and the west gable, though it survives to near its full height, is so heavily masked by ivy that its details are difficult to assess. One further detail worth noting is the relationship between the building and its immediate setting: the south wall of the church doubles as the northern boundary wall of the adjacent graveyard, meaning the two spaces have grown into each other over time, the dead on one side, the ruin on the other.

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Pete F
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