Shankill Church (in ruins), Dangan, Co. Clare
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Churches & Chapels
What remains of this medieval church near Dangan in County Clare is small enough to walk past without recognising it for what it is.
The footprint measures roughly eleven metres east to west and five metres north to south, defined by a collapsed stone wall so reduced in places that it reads more as a low earthwork than a building. Livestock graze the level interior, keeping it clear, and the whole thing sits quietly in rough pasture and mixed woodland, with a stream running some fifty-five metres to the south. The name Shankill, from the Irish Seanchill meaning old church, suggests the site was already considered ancient before it fell into ruin, a detail that raises more questions than the surviving fabric can currently answer.
The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing between 1900 and 1902, recorded it as a graveyard and fragments of a church near Dangan Ivigen, which indicates the walls were already fragmentary by the turn of the twentieth century. Of the original structure, the north wall is the most legible, running some thirteen metres in length and preserving an intact section of facing stones on its internal elevation at the western end, where the small stone spalls packed into the wall's core are still visible in place. The west wall has not survived at all; a later field boundary of noticeably different construction runs immediately to the west, and it is likely that the wall's stone was robbed out or disturbed during its construction. The east wall has been reduced to little more than a low scarp. A mound of stone heaped around the base of a tree about twelve metres to the north, and further mounds in the adjoining field to the east, may contain displaced architectural or archaeological fragments from the church, according to research by Large published in 2010. A graveyard adjoins the ruin to the east and south, suggesting the site retained some significance for the local community long after the church itself became unusable.