Coolkenna Glebe House, Killabeg, Co. Wicklow

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Coolkenna Glebe House, Killabeg, Co. Wicklow

A house that changes its name between two maps, then quietly disappears from use altogether, leaves a particular kind of gap in the historical record.

Somewhere in Killabeg, County Wicklow, a building recorded on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1838 as Coolkeena Glebe House had, by the time the revised edition was published in 1907, become Aghold Rectory. When it was visited in 1990, it was found to be abandoned.

The shift in name between those two map editions hints at the practical realities of the Church of Ireland in rural Ireland. A glebe house was the official residence attached to a Church of Ireland parish, provided for the use of its clergyman and typically funded through glebe land, that is, land set aside for the support of the local rector. The renaming as Aghold Rectory by 1907 suggests a reassignment or reclassification at some point during the intervening decades, possibly reflecting changes in how parishes were grouped or administered as the nineteenth century wore on and the church's position in Irish life shifted considerably after disestablishment in 1869. Whether the house was occupied continuously between those two survey dates is not clear, but by the end of the twentieth century the building had been left to stand empty, one of many such former ecclesiastical residences that outlasted the institution they were built to serve.

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