Church, Skull, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Skull, Co. Cork

The ruined Church of Ireland church at Skull, on the Mizen Peninsula in west Cork, is a building that contains two different centuries of construction within the same walls, and the joins between them are still legible if you know where to look.

The structure measures roughly 22 metres long by just under 10 metres wide, and it sits on the north side of a graveyard that has its own quiet layers of use and reuse.

The building as it stands is largely an eighteenth-century effort, extensively repaired in 1721 according to Brady's 1863 ecclesiastical record, but it was almost certainly erected on the footprint of a late-medieval church rather than built fresh. Two features survive from that earlier phase. One is an ogee-headed window near the east end of the north wall, the ogee being a double-curved arch shape characteristic of late-medieval Irish ecclesiastical stonework, its S-curve profile quite distinct from the rounded arches that replaced it in later rebuilding. The other is the exterior base batter on the east gable, a slight outward lean or slope at the base of the wall, a common structural technique in medieval masonry. Everything else visible today belongs to the 1721 works or thereabouts: the central west door, the large arched window openings in the north, east, and south walls, the bellcote rising from the west gable, a chancel wall with a broad arched opening, and a small porch added to the west gable, measuring roughly 3.65 metres by 3.75 metres. The result is a building that presents an eighteenth-century face while quietly preserving fragments of something considerably older embedded within it.

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