Church, Lugduff, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
On the north bank of Poulanass Brook in County Wicklow, directly opposite the better-known Reefert Church, a small ruined church survives in a state of quiet incompleteness.
Three of its four walls still stand, the south, west, and north, though none rises much above a metre in height. The building is modest in scale, measuring roughly ten and a half metres by six and a third, and its single surviving doorway sits at the western end of the south wall. It is the kind of place that could be passed without a second glance, were it not for a detail recorded in the stonework of the west wall.
The architectural historian Harold Leask, writing in 1950, noted two small rough-cut crosses fixed into that west wall. Simple incised or relief crosses of this type are relatively common in early Irish ecclesiastical sites, often marking boundaries, graves, or points of particular devotion within a monastic enclosure. By 1972, however, one of the two had already disappeared, as Healy observed in that year. Whether it was removed, stolen, or simply fell and was lost is not recorded. The one that remains is a small and unassuming thing, but it anchors the ruin to a tradition of stone-cut devotion that stretches back through the early medieval period. The church sits within the broader monastic landscape of Glendalough, one of Ireland's most significant early Christian sites, and its proximity to Reefert Church suggests it formed part of that wider complex of buildings, paths, and sacred spaces clustered along the valley floor.