Church, Myross, Co. Cork

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Church, Myross, Co. Cork

The east gable of the Myross church ruin still holds its pointed top, which is more than can be said for the west end, where the walls have shed their upper courses and the gable point is long gone.

That asymmetry gives the building an oddly lopsided profile, one end intact enough to suggest the original form, the other crumbling back into the graveyard that now surrounds it. What survives, though, is detailed enough to repay a close look: a single ogee-headed light set within a splayed embrasure beneath a segmented arch in the east wall, a doorway whose surround has disappeared but whose opening is still covered by a segmented vault formed around a plank centre, and two holy water stoups lying loose on the ground just inside the entrance.

The church is a late-medieval structure, rectangular in plan and modest in scale, measuring roughly fourteen metres internally from east to west and just under seven metres across. A lintelled window embrasure survives near the east end of the south wall, though the light itself is missing, and a wall-press, a small recess built into the wall for storing liturgical objects, has been blocked at the south end of the east wall. The building was evidently still functioning in 1615, when it was recorded as being in repair, but by 1699 it had already fallen into ruin, a collapse of less than a century noted by the ecclesiastical historian Brady. That relatively swift decline was not unusual in post-Reformation Ireland, when many rural parish churches lost their congregations to new buildings or simply to neglect as the old structures passed out of use.

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