Church, Lismire, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Lismire, Co. Cork

The small church at Lismire in north Cork carries a quiet architectural contradiction.

Its eastern gable presents a wide, plain rectangular doorway flanked on either side by pointed blind niches, door-shaped recesses with no door behind them, purely decorative gestures towards Gothic form. Above all of this sits a bellcote, while inside, the ceiling is lined with pine panels that would not look out of place in a Victorian parlour. It is the kind of building that repays a second look.

A datestone on the western gable is inscribed 1837, placing the church firmly in a period when Irish ecclesiastical architecture was negotiating between Classical restraint and a revived interest in pointed Gothic detail. The building is rectangular, its long axis running east to west, with a sacristy added to the western end. The southern wall contains three pointed windows, each fitted with a double sash arrangement topped by switchline tracery, a decorative pattern formed from curved intersecting lines that became fashionable in the early nineteenth century as a simplified nod to medieval window design. The overall effect is modest but considered, a rural building making careful use of a limited formal vocabulary.

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