Church, Sleenoge, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Sleenoge, Co. Cork

Beneath the ground at Sleenoge, in West Cork, lies a church that has entirely disappeared into the earth, its outline swallowed by the burials that accumulated around and eventually above it.

No walls remain visible, no doorway, no gable end; the ground simply closes over it, and the graves continue in every direction.

According to Brady, writing in 1867, the church was built in 1798, positioned near the foundations of an even earlier structure. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 recorded it at the centre of the graveyard, which suggests it was still a recognisable presence at that point, or at least still remembered as one. By 1856, it had been superseded by St. Bartholomew's church, built in a southward extension of the same graveyard, and whatever remained of the 1798 building was gradually buried under the continuing accumulation of interments. The proximity of two church sites here, the earlier foundations and the 1798 structure built close beside them, hints at a long continuity of use on this ground, though the physical evidence of that layering has now entirely vanished from view.

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