Church, Murragh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
In the south-east corner of a graveyard in Murragh, a stretch of old church wall runs east to west for roughly ten metres, which is all that physically remains of a building that was, by one account, still holding its own in the late seventeenth century.
What makes this fragment quietly interesting is the gap between that assessment and what followed: a wall reported as being in pretty good repair in 1699 did not survive into the nineteenth century as a functioning place of worship.
The church at Murragh was eventually superseded when a new church was built at Farranthomas in 1810, a shift that was common enough in post-Reformation and post-Penal era Ireland, as congregations were reorganised and new, more accessible buildings replaced older rural ones. The 1699 description comes by way of Brady's records, cited in his 1863 work on the Irish church, which noted the condition of numerous ecclesiastical sites across the country. Once the Farranthomas building opened, the older structure at Murragh lost its practical purpose, and the slow process of decay that tends to follow abandonment took hold. The ten-metre wall that survives in the graveyard's south-east quadrant is the last legible trace of that earlier building.
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