Church, Togher, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Churches & Chapels
A ruined church with no graves is already an oddity, but the small structure at Togher in County Westmeath adds a few more layers of strangeness on top of that.
The building is a late, plain rectangular stone church, probably dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and it sits within a low stone-walled enclosure that contains not a single burial. There is equally no trace of an earlier enclosure beneath or around it, which is unusual in a landscape where Christian sites so often overwrite much older ones.
When the ruin was recorded in 1980, the church walls survived to only around 1.25 metres high, with red brick visible in the north wall and around several openings. The more interesting element is the small two-storey tower at the western end. It retains pointed windows in its three external walls and a pointed doorway on its south side, and there appears to have been a gallery accessible from the tower's upper floor, a common arrangement in later Protestant churches where the tower served as both entrance and access to an elevated seating area for the congregation or, in some cases, the landlord's family. The roofline of the vanished church nave is still readable as a ghost image impressed into the tower wall. A low battlemented parapet crowns the tower, a modest nod to a certain period style rather than anything defensive. The red brick used around the openings sits in contrast to the stonework, a material combination typical of the Georgian period in rural Ireland, when brick was available but not yet dominant.
The site sits in a small cluster of related monuments. Togher Castle lies around 650 metres to the west, and a bawn, the defensive enclosure that would have surrounded a tower house or fortified residence, survives approximately 550 metres to the north-east. The church, with its lack of a burial ground and its tidy enclosure, may well have served as a private or estate chapel rather than a parish church in the conventional sense, which would explain something of its modest, self-contained character.