Church, Skeam, Co. Cork
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Churches & Chapels
On the eastern shore of Skeam West Island, off the coast of West Cork, a small rectangular church is in the process of being slowly consumed by the sea.
Its eastern end has already gone over the cliff edge, taking whatever once stood there with it into the water below. What remains is the western portion, preserved to its full original height, giving the ruin an oddly complete appearance from one angle and an abrupt, truncated one from another.
The surviving masonry repays close attention. The west gable retains its antae, projections of the side walls that extend beyond the gable face, a feature typical of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture that may have supported a timber roof structure or simply defined the building's corners with additional solidity. Above an external offset on the gable sits a blocked rectangular opening, and at the south-west corner there are possible remains of a springing course, the point from which a corbelled or pitched stone roof would have begun to curve inward. A lintelled doorway sits centrally in the west wall, and the foundations of a splayed window opening survive at ground level in the south wall. Adjoining the west end of the church is a raised rectangular platform, roughly ten metres by six, with traces of a mortared wall along its northern side, its original function unclear. To the north and south of the church lies an extensive burial ground. Excavation in 1990 uncovered a V-shaped ditch to the south of the church, and the same work identified remains of secondary habitation in the same area, interpreted as dating to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, suggesting the site continued to draw some form of settled activity long after its primary ecclesiastical use.