Kilkerrin Church (in ruins), Kilkerrin, Co. Galway

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Kilkerrin Church (in ruins), Kilkerrin, Co. Galway

A roofless Protestant church in a large rectangular graveyard in east County Galway presents an interesting puzzle: by the time anyone thought to record it carefully, the earlier church it may have replaced had already vanished so completely that observers could not even confirm whether a medieval parochial building had ever stood there at all.

The ruin that does survive sits on a slight rise in undulating grassland, occupying the south-western corner of the graveyard, its three remaining walls, the north, south, and east gable, rising from the surrounding field with a quiet, unfinished quality.

The church was erected in 1784, according to local historical sources, and was already described in 1837 as being about to be rebuilt, a rebuilding that apparently never came. Ordnance Survey letters compiled in the 1820s, and later published by O'Flanagan in 1927, noted the structure as a Protestant church that had been deserted some time before and was threatening ruin, while also remarking, with a certain candour, that no trace of any older parochial church was then observable, and that it was unclear whether one had ever existed in any significant form. By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the building was already marked as being in ruins. What survives today is a rectangular structure measuring roughly 13.8 metres long and 7.7 metres wide externally, oriented east to west in the conventional manner for a Christian church. Its most distinctive feature is the series of large pointed arch windows, two set into each of the long side-walls and one placed centrally in the east gable, a Gothic detail that sits slightly at odds with the building's modest late eighteenth-century origins and adds an unexpected formality to an otherwise plain structure.

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