Church, Temple, Co. Mayo

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Temple, Co. Mayo

In a graveyard in the townland of Temple, County Mayo, there is a church that exists only on paper.

No wall, no foundation course, no scatter of dressed stone marks the spot where a Roman Catholic chapel once stood at the northern edge of the burial ground, beside a road. The ground simply continues, unremarkable, giving no indication that anything was ever built there at all.

The chapel appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, drawn as a rectangular building roughly twenty to twenty-four metres along its long axis and seven to ten metres across. By the time the same survey was revised for its 1920 edition, the building had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and nothing has been visible at ground level since. What makes the site quietly layered is a note recorded in the 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of field observations compiled by surveyors as they worked through the country, in which the chapel is said to have been built on top of an even earlier church, one old enough to have given Killbeagh parish its name. The OS Letters were later edited and published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1927, and that passing remark is essentially all that survives to connect this graveyard to a sequence of Christian use that may reach back considerably further than the nineteenth-century building that finally disappeared between one map edition and the next.

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