Church, Templerainy, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
What gives this ruined church at Templerainy its quiet interest is a structural contradiction built right into its walls.
The chancel, the eastern portion of the building reserved for the altar and clergy, is constructed from large stone blocks with walls nearly a metre thick and features antae, projecting side walls that extend slightly beyond the end gable. Antae are a hallmark of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture, suggesting this part of the building is considerably older than the nave attached to it. The nave, by contrast, is wider and built of smaller stones, indicating that two distinct phases of construction, separated perhaps by centuries, were joined into a single structure at some point. The whole is now deeply overgrown.
The church sits towards the northern end of a graveyard that preserves its own subtle antiquity. Recorded on the 1907 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a roughly rectangular enclosure measuring approximately forty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south, the site is defined by an earth and stone bank with a fosse, a shallow external ditch, along the northern side. Such enclosed ecclesiastical sites are common across Ireland and often indicate early medieval origins, when religious communities demarcated their precinct with a boundary that was as much symbolic as defensive. Despite the graveyard remaining in use into at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only a single seventeenth-century headstone now survives in place, though the Ordnance Survey Name Books record that several examples from that period and the following century once stood here, their subsequent loss or deterioration leaving the site quieter and less legible than it once was.