Church, Macreddin, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
At Macreddin in County Wicklow, a parish church once stood within what is now simply an old graveyard, and today there is nothing left of it at all.
No foundations, no rubble scatter, no outline in the grass. The building has vanished so completely that when the site was formally inspected, no trace of any structure could be found.
Bradley and King, writing in 1989, recorded that the parish church had occupied this graveyard plot, but their note carries an air of finality: the building was gone by the time anyone looked carefully. This kind of disappearance is not entirely unusual in rural Ireland, where small medieval or post-medieval churches were often dismantled over the centuries, their cut stone carried off for field walls, farmhouses, or later ecclesiastical buildings nearby. The graveyard itself survives, which is often the more durable element; burial grounds tend to persist in local memory and continued use long after whatever church once anchored them has been taken apart or simply collapsed and been absorbed back into the ground.