Church, Leighmoney Beg, Co. Cork

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Church, Leighmoney Beg, Co. Cork

At the centre of a graveyard in Leighmoney Beg, Co. Cork, the outline of a medieval parish church survives in a state of near-total collapse.

The walls are largely broken down and heavily overgrown, but the footprint of a rectangular building is still legible on the ground, measuring just under fourteen metres along its south-east to north-west axis and a little over five metres across. Gaps in the south-west wall mark where a window and a door once opened, and a wide, shallow niche at the base of the south-east wall, nearly two and three-quarter metres across but only forty-four centimetres deep, may represent the base of a central window ope. It is an unassuming scatter of rubble by most measures, but the proportions speak clearly enough to anyone willing to read them.

This was the parish church of Leighmoney, and it was already a ruin by 1615, a date recorded by Brady in the nineteenth century. That places its abandonment somewhere in the turbulent decades surrounding the Elizabethan and Jacobean reorganisation of the Irish church, when many medieval parish structures fell out of use, decayed, or were simply left behind as communities shifted and ecclesiastical arrangements changed. The church would have served a rural parish in what is now east Cork, and its modest internal dimensions suggest a congregation that was local and relatively small. Exactly when it was built, and by whom, the surviving fabric does not say.

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