Church, Temple Patrick, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Temple Patrick, Co. Westmeath

On poorly drained, partially reclaimed pasture in County Westmeath, a medieval church has been slowly disappearing into scrub.

The ruins, known locally as Templepatrick, sit at the centre of a disused graveyard, ringed by low earthen banks and faint cultivation ridges that hint at a much older, more populous landscape beneath the grass. By the time cartographers produced the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the building was already reduced to a ruin, marked plainly as "Church" within a sub-rectangular, tree-lined enclosure. On aerial photography it is now largely obscured by vegetation altogether.

The church itself measures roughly 13.8 metres along its east-west axis and 8.1 metres across, its outline preserved in low wall footings. A fragment of the south wall still stands near the south-east corner, about a metre wide, and remnants survive at the north-west and south-west corners as well, one of them reinforced by a buttress against the north face. Toward the east end of the south wall there are traces of a window opening and a small rectangular niche that may have served as an aumbry or piscina, the latter being a shallow liturgical basin used for disposing of consecrated water. No decorated stonework is visible. The graveyard enclosing the ruin contains headstones from the 18th and 19th centuries, but the low banks surrounding it on all sides are harder to date. Some are likely the remains of post-medieval enclosures, while others may be considerably older, possibly the remnants of a field system or the dwellings of a small clustered settlement shown at this very location on the Down Survey map of 1657 to 1659. Curiously, the church itself does not appear on that survey; what is recorded instead is a cluster of four cabins, and a terrier of the parish noted that on the lands of Templepatrick there stood "a mill and some cabins".

The dedication to St Patrick carries its own ambiguity. Writing in 1958, the Reverend Brady noted that St Patrick was said to have founded a church at Moyvore, and that the pre-Reformation diocese of Meath contained fourteen churches bearing the saint's dedication, including the one at Moyvore. Templepatrick, it has been suggested, may have been that very church. Whether the association is ancient or a product of later local tradition, the name preserves something of a claim that the landscape around it has largely swallowed up.

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