Church, Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

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Church, Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

At the foot of Powerscourt Waterfall, beside the Dargle River in County Wicklow, a small church once stood complete enough to have cut stonework in its doorway and windows.

By 1836, that stonework had already vanished. The site sits on a natural level platform, roughly 30 metres by 20 metres, overlooking the steep river bank, a modest footprint for what was once a place of worship and burial.

The disappearance of the dressed stone was noted in the Ordnance Survey letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928, drawing on earlier observations from 1836, suggesting the church had been robbed out for building material well before anyone thought to record it properly. Alongside the church and its burial ground, the site also held a bullaun stone, a large boulder bearing four artificial cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface. Bullauns are found at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and are thought to have served ritual or practical functions, though their precise use is debated. This particular example, described by the archaeologist Liam Price in the 1950s, was situated on the southern bank of the river until relatively recently. Severe flooding in the Dargle valley in recent years has damaged the area considerably, and the bullaun stone's current condition and precise location are uncertain.

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