Church, Imphrick, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Churches & Chapels
By 1615, the parish church of Imphrick was already described as being in ruins, which raises an immediate question: how long had it been struggling before that point, and what exactly was still worth describing?
The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. The west gable still stands today in the north-west corner of the graveyard, heavily smothered in ivy, and it retains a bellcote at its crown and a small flat-headed window set high in the stonework. The returns of the north and south walls extend a short distance from the gable before giving way to low, overgrown ridges that trace the outline of a building measuring more than seventeen metres east to west internally. A burial vault and a corresponding rise in the ground likely mark where the east gable once stood.
The church carries layers that accumulated over several centuries. It appears in the Papal Taxation of 1291, a medieval ecclesiastical survey that assessed church revenues across Ireland, which places its origins firmly in the mediaeval period. A 1906 account noted three distinct phases of architecture visible in the fabric, two of them described as ancient and differing from one another in age, and a third representing later work associated with the Holmes family, whose monument, dated 1757, was said to be a conspicuous presence within the structure. Running parallel to the south wall, the foundations and partial walls of a secondary structure, roughly nine metres by three and a half, were also recorded; this was considered to be as old as the main building itself. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the site at six inches to the mile, the church was shown as an irregular T-shape, a form possibly explained by an annexe or large buttress projecting from the west end of the south wall, the remains of which are still visible as an external projection.
The north wall preserves a ruined doorway beneath a segmental arch, a rounded arch form common in later mediaeval Irish church building, as well as a gap near the west gable that may mark an earlier entrance. The east end of the ruin is largely absorbed by vegetation and earthworks, but the burial vault near that end gives some physical anchor to what is otherwise a site that requires a degree of imaginative reconstruction to read fully.