Church, Toberaquill, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Toberaquill, Co. Westmeath

On a steep north-west facing slope in County Westmeath, in a field of ordinary grassland, there is almost nothing left to see.

Almost. A low mound of stones, grass-covered and barely half a metre high, roughly five metres across one way and seven the other, sits at the centre of what was once a small churchyard. By 1911, the Ordnance Survey was already labelling the spot as a church site rather than a church, and by the time an aerial photograph was taken in November 2011, only the very faintest outline of the levelled building remained detectable. It is the kind of erasure that happens slowly, over generations, until the ground itself seems to have forgotten what it once held.

The 1837 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map records the site more generously, showing a small rectangular church aligned roughly north-east to south-west, standing within a trapezoidal enclosure that may have served as a burial ground. That enclosure was bounded to the north by a narrow roadway which ran north-east towards the public road, a feature now equally vanished from the landscape. The site sits within the townland of Toberaquill, with a stream marking the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Knockatee just thirty metres to the west. Two other features of considerable antiquity survive nearby: a holy well lies seventy-five metres to the south-west, and a ringfort, the remains of a circular earthen enclosure of early medieval date, sits around a hundred and seventy-five metres to the south-east. The clustering of church, well, and ringfort in close proximity is a pattern found across Ireland, where ecclesiastical and pre-Christian or secular sites frequently occupy the same stretch of ground, each layer of significance accumulating quietly over centuries.

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Pete F
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