Church, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

What appears on an early twentieth-century Ordnance Survey map as the remains of a church at Oldcourt in north County Cork turns out, on closer inspection, to be something else entirely: a walled family grave plot, built against the southern wall of the graveyard, measuring just over twenty-two metres east to west on the outside and five metres across internally.

Inside sits a late eighteenth-century chest tomb, a horizontal stone box-like monument of the kind that became fashionable among prosperous Catholic and Protestant families alike during that period, bearing the name Cotter. No masonry survives from any church. The building that once stood here has left nothing visible above ground.

The site belongs to Doneraile parish, and the chapel-of-ease it once contained, known as Oldcourt or Rossdock, was already described as being in ruins by 1615, a detail recorded by Brady in the nineteenth century. A chapel-of-ease was a secondary place of worship, built at a convenient distance from a parish church to spare parishioners a long journey, and this one had evidently fallen out of use well before any serious effort was made to document it. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the enclosure but does not name it; by 1937, the same feature had been interpreted, apparently in error, as the footprint of a ruined church. The Cotter tomb and the enclosing wall appear to have been mistaken for ecclesiastical fabric, which says something about how quickly the memory of a building can dissolve into the landscape once the building itself has gone.

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