Church, Corrstown, Co. Dublin

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Church, Corrstown, Co. Dublin

What remains at Corrstown is, in essence, a single tower base sitting in a raised walled graveyard, the rest of the church long since gone.

The site is known by the old placename Chapelmidway, and the tower that survives is not even a complete structure, just the lowest section, standing 2.3 metres high, built from roughly coursed limestone blocks. Yet despite its reduced state, it preserves a surprising amount of internal detail: a barrel-vaulted chamber, a mural chamber set into a projection on the northern end of the western wall, and the stump of a stone spiral staircase in the south-west corner that has been stabilised and partially rebuilt. On the east wall, a diagonal scar in the stonework marks where the gable of the vanished church once met the tower, a ghostly outline of a building that no longer exists. Foundation lines can still be traced running roughly 8 metres east of the tower, suggesting the extent of what once stood here.

The church at Chapelmidway was not an independent place of worship but a subsidiary chapel attached to the parish of Kilsallaghan, a larger ecclesiastical site a short distance away in north County Dublin. This dependency was noted by the antiquarian P.W. Joyce in 1890, and the name Chapelmidway may reflect the chapel's position between settlements or along a route, though the precise logic of the name has not been definitively established. The segmental arch, which describes a shallow curved opening rather than a pointed or semicircular one, leads into the vaulted ground-floor chamber, which measures just over four metres in each internal direction. A barrel vault is a simple continuous arch of stone running the length of a space, common in Irish tower construction, and here it has survived intact despite the loss of everything around it.

The site sits in a walled graveyard, and the tower base is accessible within that enclosure. The raised ground level of the graveyard is itself worth noticing, as such elevation often indicates long and continuous burial use, the accumulated layers of successive interments gradually lifting the ground above the surrounding landscape. The foundations traceable to the east of the tower are subtle and easy to miss, but worth looking for if you want to get a sense of the original church's footprint. The interior of the tower base can be entered through the east-wall opening, which gives a close view of the vaulting and the mural chamber, though the space is compact.

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