Church, Ballynure, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
A single fragment of carved stonework, the upper portion of a twin-light ogee-headed window, is all that remains to suggest something much older once stood at this Church of Ireland site in Ballynure, County Wicklow.
The present church appears entirely modern, and the graveyard around it offers no obvious early remains. Yet this one piece of dressed stone, with its characteristically curved Gothic arch, points quietly toward a medieval predecessor.
An ogee-headed window, where each arch curves outward before tapering to a point, is a form most commonly associated with late medieval ecclesiastical building in Ireland, broadly spanning the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The survival of just the top portion here, set within a graveyard that has otherwise been cleared or rebuilt over, is the kind of evidence that seldom draws attention but carries real weight for those tracing the geography of medieval religious sites. It suggests a parish church, or perhaps a smaller chapel, that has been entirely replaced or demolished, leaving this fragment as the sole above-ground indicator of its existence.