Church, Castleland, Co. Cork

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Church, Castleland, Co. Cork

The Church of Ireland parish church at Castleland, on the southern edge of Buttevant in north County Cork, is a compact but curiously busy building, its roofline bristling with pinnacles at every corner and gable, topped by a ribbed spire rising from an embattled two-storey tower at the west end.

It sits within a graveyard immediately south-west of Buttevant Castle, in occasional use rather than regular worship, and has the quiet, slightly formal air of a building that has outlasted most of its congregation.

The church was built in 1826, on a site where earlier churches had already stood for some considerable time, and was designed by the Pain brothers, the Cork-based architects James and George Richard Pain, who were pupils of John Nash and responsible for a remarkable number of ecclesiastical and domestic buildings across Munster during the early nineteenth century. The structure is cruciform in plan, a cross-shaped layout with a nave running east to west, a chancel at the eastern end, and transepts flanking it, with low single-storey projections set at forty-five degree angles filling the angles between the chancel and each transept. The whole is built in coursed ashlar limestone, with pointed window openings fitted with hood mouldings, the decorative drip-strips above window arches that deflect rainwater from the glass. Inside the church, an early graveslab survives, a fragment of an older layer of devotion on this site that predates the Pain brothers' neat, self-contained design by an unknown span of centuries.

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