Church, Bahana, Co. Wicklow

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Church, Bahana, Co. Wicklow

Of the medieval church at Bahana, only one wall still stands to any meaningful height.

The east gable reaches 5.4 metres, a lone upright in a field of fallen rubble, and in it sits an incomplete window framed by chamfered granite jambs, the stonework cut at a deliberate angle to soften the inner edge of the opening. Beside the window, set into the southeast angle of the same gable, is a small wall niche, the kind used to hold a vessel or a candle, a quiet domestic detail preserved in the one section of the building that escaped collapse. The rest of the nave and chancel, which together measured just over twelve metres east to west, has subsided into low rubble banks no higher than knee level.

The church served the parish of Kilcommon, a name that appears in early Irish sources as Cille Commáin and Gill Comain, forms recorded by the scholar Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich. The dedication is to Saint Commán, and the site sits on a pronounced south-facing slope above a valley in County Wicklow, a position that would have made it a visible landmark in the surrounding landscape. The building itself was constructed from uncoursed mortared rubble, that is, rough stones bedded in mortar without being laid in regular horizontal layers, a common technique for rural ecclesiastical buildings in medieval Ireland. The church stands towards the eastern end of a quadrangular graveyard, its enclosure defined by a collapsed earth and stone bank and, on the north and east sides, by a slight outer fosse, a shallow ditch that once reinforced the boundary. Inside the ruined nave, several graveslabs survive from the mid-eighteenth century, suggesting the site remained in use for burial well after the church itself had fallen out of regular use.

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