Carrownalecka Church, Carrownalecka, Co. Mayo

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Churches & Chapels

Carrownalecka Church, Carrownalecka, Co. Mayo

At the north-east corner of a large graveyard in Carrownalecka, a roofless rectangular church sits so deep in vegetation that its stonework is more inferred than seen.

The building measures roughly 7.5 metres north to south and 31.3 metres east to west, making it a notably long structure, and its walls rise from a protruding plinth of roughly coursed limestone rubble. That plinth detail is worth a moment's attention: it suggests some ambition in the original construction, a deliberate architectural gesture now almost entirely swallowed by ivy and encroaching growth.

What survives of the fabric tells a layered story of alteration and abandonment. The south wall, still standing to around 3.4 metres, retains three narrow single-light windows, along with a lintelled niche near the east end and a blocked arched feature whose original purpose is no longer clear. The north wall is more poorly preserved but still holds traces of at least two narrow lights set in splayed embrasures, the splaying designed to draw in the maximum light through a thick stone wall, and another lintelled niche near the east end. The east window itself was at some point altered to accommodate a later insertion, which was then blocked in turn, leaving a sequence of changes fossilised in the masonry. An opening in the west wall may originally have served as the main doorway. Today the interior is filled with gravestones, the ground entirely given over to burial, so that the church functions now as little more than a roofless enclosure for the dead.

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Pete F
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