Church, Nohaval, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Nohaval, Co. Cork

There is a field in Nohaval, County Cork, that local people have long called Páirc an tSéipéil, the Chapel Field, and yet there is almost nothing to see there.

No walls, no carved stone, no outline of a doorway. The place of worship that supposedly once stood here has left little behind except a slight rise in the ground and the memory of a name.

When Bowman surveyed the site in 1934, there was at least something to observe. He recorded a roughly circular enclosure on J. Daly's farm, around thirty-two yards in diameter, covering about half an acre, and sitting approximately two feet higher than the surrounding field level. Grass-covered mounds indicated where a chapel had stood, though the enclosing fence had already been levelled by that point. Ó Drisceoil, writing in the same year, noted that the field immediately to the east of a nearby holy well carried the Irish name for Chapel Field, and that local tradition firmly held the site to be a former place of worship, even then without any structural trace remaining. Holy wells and early church sites frequently occur together in the Irish landscape, the well often predating or outlasting the formal religious building it was associated with, and that pairing seems to hold here. By the time subsequent surveys were carried out, no visible surface trace of any kind could be found.

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