Church, Clenor, Co. Cork

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Clenor, Co. Cork

Within the southern half of Clenor graveyard in north Cork, two churches occupy the same modest plot, separated by roughly ten metres.

One is an older ruin; the other, slightly newer, is a roofless shell that was built in 1813, stripped of its roof in 1887, and has been quietly decaying ever since. The juxtaposition is quietly odd, like watching a conversation between two buildings neither of which has much left to say.

The 1813 structure was a Church of Ireland parish church, designed to accommodate eighty persons, a modest congregation by any measure. It is rectangular in plan with its long axis running east to west, and the stonework beneath its lime render is random-rubble limestone, a construction method common in rural Irish ecclesiastical buildings of the period. The south wall carries three wide pointed windows with switch line tracery and cusped ogee heads, the ogee being that double-curved shape familiar from late Gothic ornament. The north wall, by contrast, presents three blind round-headed windows to the outside, meaning they have no opening or glazing, serving a decorative rather than practical function. A three-storey tower anchors the west end of the nave, with a pointed door opening in its south wall. Inside, the walls were originally dry-lined with slates, a technique that served as insulation and finished surface simultaneously, and some of those slates are still in place. A small flue survives in the north wall. The church was sold in 1887, at which point the roof was removed, a common fate for Church of Ireland buildings that became surplus to requirements following the disestablishment of the church in 1869 and the subsequent consolidation of rural parishes.

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