Church, Swords Glebe, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Churches & Chapels
What stands in the churchyard at Swords Glebe is not quite a church any more, and not quite a house either.
The western tower of the medieval parish church is the only part of the original building to survive, yet its interior details suggest it served a very different purpose from simple bell-ringing. A fireplace on the second floor, two wall presses set into the masonry beside it, a barrel-vaulted ground floor, a newel staircase tucked into a corner turret: these are the fixtures of a residential building, a tower in which someone actually lived. The gable scar still visible on the south wall is the ghost of the long-vanished nave, pressed into the stone like a memory the structure cannot quite shake.
The tower rises four storeys to a belfry stage, built from coursed limestone masonry with dressed quoins at the corners. The upper floors are noticeably offset from the lower ones, and the style of the masonry shifts at the belfry level, suggesting the building was altered or completed in more than one phase. Entry is through a pointed arched doorway in the south wall, and each upper floor is reached through pointed, double-centred arches, a form associated with late medieval craftsmanship. One detail that repays attention is built into the very base of that same south wall: an early medieval cross slab, a carved stone marker that predates the tower itself and was incorporated into the later structure, where it has remained ever since. The belfry openings on the north, south, and east sides retain their louvres, the angled wooden slats designed to project sound outward while keeping weather out. The 1818 Church of Ireland building that now occupies the same churchyard is a later, separate structure entirely.
The tower sits on a height to the northwest of the 1818 church, within the churchyard grounds. Visitors approaching from the modern church will see it rising above the surrounding gravestones, its limestone walls giving it a quiet solidity against the sky. The cross slab at the base of the south wall is easy to overlook if you are not specifically looking for it, so it is worth pausing there before moving to the doorway. The interior dimensions are modest, the ground floor measuring roughly four metres east to west and four and a half north to south, with walls nearly one and a half metres thick, so the space inside is tighter than the exterior might suggest.