Rathgormuck Church (in Ruins), Rathgormuck, Co. Waterford

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Rathgormuck Church (in Ruins), Rathgormuck, Co. Waterford

What remains of the old parish church at Rathgormuck is, by any measure, a fragment: a single west gable standing to its full height, a short stretch of north wall, and little else above ground but foundations. Yet that gable repays attention. It carries a pointed doorway, an ivy-clad double belfry, and, close to where a pointed window once sat before it was robbed out, two carved stone heads on the external face. These faces, worn and exposed on a northeast-facing slope in County Waterford, are the kind of detail that passes without remark in a landscape full of old walls, but they are there, watching the road.

The church sat within a triangular graveyard, still defined by a stone-clad earthen bank, though the triangle was probably clipped at the northwest when a road was cut diagonally across the site. By the 1830s, when the scholar John O'Donovan recorded the building during the progress of the Ordnance Survey, there was still a second pointed doorway in the north wall, standing five feet three inches high, with a rectangular window to its east. A few steps of a stair survived further along that same wall, noted by the antiquarian P. Power in 1896, possibly the remains of access to a rood screen, the carved wooden partition that once divided nave from chancel in many medieval Irish churches. No tower was ever part of this building, despite those stairs suggesting something overhead. Built into the graveyard wall beside the road, roughly six metres southwest of the entrance, is a bullaun stone, a large flat-topped boulder with a deliberately hollowed basin worn or carved into its surface. Bullaun stones are found at early Christian sites across Ireland, their basins sometimes associated with ritual use or the grinding of grain, and this one, rectangular and modest, has been incorporated into the boundary wall rather than left loose in the grass. About a hundred metres to the north stands a tower house, a reminder that this small rural site once sat within a landscape of functioning medieval settlement.

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