Church, Bunkilla, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Bunkilla, Co. Cork

In the pastureland of Bunkilla in mid Cork, a low rectangular platform sits on a north-east-facing slope, its modest rise of just over a metre above the surrounding ground being the most immediately legible sign that something deliberate once stood here.

The platform, roughly thirteen metres east to west and under seven metres north to south, was apparently constructed to level out the hillslope beneath whatever building occupied it, a practical solution that gives the site its only real physical presence today. What remains of the structure itself is mostly defined by sod-covered walls so low they could easily be walked past without notice.

A researcher named Hartnett, writing in 1939, recorded that the southern edge of the plan was marked by a line of upright stone slabs still projecting above ground level, while the other walls had sunk beneath grass and earth. He also noted what appeared to be window or door openings, known in architectural terms as opes, at the centre of the west wall and near its north end. One further puzzle he identified was that the west wall seemed to extend beyond the corners of the building to both north and south, a continuation that likely has nothing to do with the church itself but instead represents the ghost of a field boundary visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, subsequently levelled and now gone. Whether the structure was ever a formal ecclesiastical building in the conventional sense, a simple oratory, or something else entirely, has never been firmly established, and the site remains genuinely ambiguous.

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Pete F
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