Church, Castlemagner, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Castlemagner, Co. Cork

The interior of the former Church of Ireland parish church at Castlemagner still holds its pulpit, pews, and memorial plaques, despite the building having long since fallen out of use.

That quiet persistence of furnishings inside a vacant shell gives the place an odd, suspended quality, as though a congregation simply stepped out one Sunday and never came back. The building sits in the northern half of the surrounding graveyard, its embattled three-storey tower at the west end lending it a faintly defensive silhouette unusual for a rural Protestant parish church of its period.

The church was built in 1816 of random-rubble limestone, designed to accommodate around 120 people, and raised on the site of an earlier church, the low overgrown walls at the south-east corner of the nave possibly being the remnants of that older structure. The building is a fairly compact composition: a rectangular nave running roughly twelve metres east to west, with three pointed windows featuring Y-tracery along the south wall, and a grouping of three lancet windows lighting the east end of the chancel. The tower, which measures roughly three and a half metres by two and a half, has a pointed door opening with a hood moulding on its south face. The roof inside follows a simple wooden king-post design. The church was repaired in 1873, and by 1887 a lean-to vestry had been added along the north wall, complete with a new heating apparatus. Between 1900 and 1903 the building received a new roof and the chancel was added, so what stands today is the product of nearly a century of incremental improvement rather than any single vision. The rectory, a two-storey building over a basement with a hipped roof and a four-bay south-east elevation, was built slightly earlier in 1813 and survives about a hundred metres to the west.

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