Church, Threemilewater, Co. Wicklow

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Threemilewater, Co. Wicklow

On an east-facing slope above a stream in County Wicklow, the low rubble walls of a roofless church are all that may remain of an entire medieval borough.

The settlement of Ennisboyne has otherwise vanished, leaving behind no streets, no market cross, no legible plan, only this quietly subsiding structure and the graveyard that has grown around it. The walls survive to little more than a metre in height, built from uncoursed rubble in the manner common to early Irish ecclesiastical sites, and the outline of a possible doorway can still be made out at the western end of the south wall. What makes the site stranger still is a carved stone block standing just to the west of the church, roughly half a metre tall, bearing the inscription "RCAC 1690" on its only uncut face and the letter "B" deeply cut into its top. Its purpose and the identity behind those initials have not been firmly established.

The site is known as Inishboheen and is associated with St Baothin, suggesting origins in the Early Christian period, when small monastic or ecclesiastical communities were established across Ireland, often beside water and on sloping ground that offered both drainage and outlook. The nave, measuring approximately 13.3 metres by 6.6 metres internally, is thought to be the older portion of the building. Records cited by Ronan in 1928 indicate that the chancel, a shorter and narrower eastern extension used for the altar and clergy, was added in the late 1620s, and there is a faint structural suggestion that the original nave walls once continued further east before the junction was made. The subtriangular graveyard enclosing the church in its north-east corner is defined by a modern stone wall and contains several headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marking continued use of the site long after the building itself fell out of use.

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