Church, Rush Demesne, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Churches & Chapels
Along the coast road between Skerries and Loughshinny Village in north County Dublin, a small ruined church sits within a walled graveyard on a raised piece of ground, quietly subsiding into itself.
The west gable wall is extensively cracked, and a structural survey has attributed this not to any dramatic event but to the slow, patient pressure of the surrounding graves. The dead, in other words, are gradually pulling the building apart.
The church itself is a plain, oblong structure, measuring roughly 13.80 metres long by 4.60 metres wide, and aligned east to west in the standard medieval fashion. It is built of coursed limestone masonry, and both gables remain standing. A single bellcote sits atop the west gable, now heavily covered in ivy. Entry was through two opposed pointed arch openings towards the western end of the nave, facing each other across the interior. The east window retains traces of 15th-century tracery, the carved decorative stonework that fills the upper portion of a gothic window opening, along with an external hood moulding, a projecting course of stone designed to throw rainwater clear of the opening below. One further window survives in the south wall of the nave, notable for its jambs of tufa, a porous volcanic stone occasionally used in medieval Irish construction and noted here by Healy in 1975. A structural survey carried out by Nolan in 2011 also recorded mortar washing out at the base of the north wall, a sign of ongoing water ingress and slow deterioration.
The site is accessible from the coast road that runs between Skerries and Loughshinny, and the raised position of the graveyard means the church is visible from the approach. The walled enclosure is the immediate context for everything here, and it is worth taking time with the fabric of the building itself rather than passing through quickly. The ivy on the bellcote obscures the stonework beneath, and the cracking on the west gable is visible enough to make the structural concerns described in the survey easy to appreciate in person. The tracery fragments in the east window are faint but present, and the tufa jambs in the south wall have a noticeably different texture from the surrounding limestone masonry.