Currans Church (in ruins), Ardcrone, Co. Kerry

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Currans Church (in ruins), Ardcrone, Co. Kerry

A nineteenth-century observer, tasked with cataloguing the antiquities of this Kerry parish, dismissed the ruined church at Ardcrone with notable bluntness: it was, he wrote in 1841, of "no interest whatever to the architectural antiquary.

" That verdict was John O'Donovan's, and it tells you as much about the priorities of his era as it does about the building itself. What he found on the road between Killarney and Castleisland was a small rubble-stone church, built in 1740, its walls still largely intact, its east window formed partly of red brick, its west gable carrying a single-arched belfry, also of brick. These were modest, practical choices rather than ambitious ones, and O'Donovan's impatience with them is almost endearing in retrospect. The building survives today in reasonably complete form, its ivy-covered walls standing close to their original height of around 3.6 metres, with round-headed windows in the north and south walls and a doorway in the west gable just wide enough for a small congregation to file through.

The site has a longer history than the 1740 structure suggests. The parish of Currans, whose Irish name Na Coirríní refers to a round hill, appears in the papal taxation records of 1302, when the church of "Curmys" was valued annually at 13 shillings and 4 pence, with tithes assessed at a further 16 pence, as part of the diocese of Ardfert. By 1615, a Royal Visitation of the same diocese recorded the vicarage of Currans as sequestered and assigned to one Jessie Gilbert, described as minister aegrotat, meaning a minister who was ill or incapacitated, though the entry notes it was "orderly served" and valued at six pounds. The surrounding lands of Ardcrone passed into Protestant settler hands in 1666, when they were included in a grant to John Blennerhassett under the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, the legal mechanism by which Cromwellian-era land transfers were formalised and new proprietors secured their titles.

The church sits in the north-east quadrant of its graveyard, and the interior still contains a number of graves, the ground surface uneven underfoot. A cut stone is visible in the external face of the west doorway, set low on the north side. The structure is aligned roughly north-east to south-west rather than the strict east-west orientation more commonly associated with earlier ecclesiastical buildings, a small irregularity that rewards a second look once you know to notice it.

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