Church, Bremore, Co. Dublin
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Churches & Chapels
Somewhere beneath the overgrowth at Bremore, on the southern fringe of a disused graveyard in north County Dublin, a single wall still stands from a late medieval church that once served as the manorial chapel for the Bremore estate.
The wall is the most visible thing left; the rest has largely surrendered to vegetation. But embedded along the interior of that surviving southern wall are fragments of seventeenth-century decorated stonework, cemented in place at some point as though someone thought it important to preserve them even as the building itself was abandoned. Among them is a lintel dated to 1689, carved with emblems of the Passion, and two double-light decorated window heads. A carved crucifixion that was also once fixed here has since been removed to Ardgillan Castle, several kilometres to the north. A plain lintel lies on the ground near the graveyard entrance, and a mass dial, a small carved sundial used to mark the hours of prayer, recovered during excavations nearby, is thought to have originated from the chapel.
The site carries a much older reputation than its medieval stonework suggests. It is reputed to be the early monastic site known as Lann Beachaire, possibly founded by St. Molaga in the seventh century, a connection noted by scholars including Walsh in 1888 and repeated in Gwynn and Hadcock's survey of medieval religious houses in 1970. The name Lann Beachaire translates roughly as the church of the beekeeper, and the site is traditionally linked to St. Modomnócc, a figure associated in hagiographic tradition with the transportation of bees from Wales to Ireland. Whether that legend preserves any genuine historical memory is impossible to say, but it gives the place an unusually specific folklore identity. The church structure recorded in 1992 measured roughly 13 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south, with walls reaching up to 3 metres in height, built of coursed limestone masonry throughout. There was an undivided nave and chancel, a small western extension, a doorway in the northern wall now incorporated into an adjacent garden wall, and a plain loop window in the south.
The church sits south of Bremore fortified house, and the graveyard around it is no longer in use. Access requires some attention; the site is extensively overgrown and only the southern wall is readily discernible. The gate piers at the graveyard entrance are worth pausing at, since the plain lintel resting nearby is easy to overlook. Anyone with an interest in early medieval monasticism or the later manorial history of the Dublin coastline will find the stonework fragments along that remaining wall quietly rewarding, even if the building they once belonged to has largely disappeared into the ivy.