Church, Commons, Co. Wicklow

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Commons, Co. Wicklow

What remains of this church in Commons, County Wicklow, amounts to very little: a single east gable, less than two metres high and not much wider, standing on level ground at the edge of a sharp drop to the south-west.

Yet beside that fragment sits a granite font, roughly eighty centimetres across, which has outlasted almost everything else the building once contained. The contrast between the near-total disappearance of the structure and the survival of this heavy, functional object gives the site an quietly unsettling quality.

When surveyors recorded the church for the Ordnance Survey Letters in the nineteenth century, compiled and published by O'Flanagan in 1928, it was still possible to take meaningful measurements: roughly sixteen and a half metres long by nearly six metres wide, with an internal partition dividing the interior about five and a half metres from the east end, and traces of a cut-stone window surviving in the south wall. Since then, the walls have collapsed to an average height of around one metre, and only the east gable has held its form with any confidence. The church is traditionally associated with St Ernin, an early Irish saint, though the precise nature of that association, whether founder, patron, or something else, is not elaborated in the historical record. The building sits towards the northern end of an oval graveyard measuring roughly fifty metres by forty, a shape that often indicates an early medieval enclosure predating the rectilinear layouts of later ecclesiastical sites. The boundary wall itself dates to the early nineteenth century, but may follow the line of a much older perimeter. Along it, a number of eighteenth-century headstones have been re-erected, displaced from their original positions but preserved from further loss.

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