Grave Yard, Castletimon, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
One of the more quietly telling details at this ruined church in Castletimon is not what remains but what has been moved.
A cylindrical granite font, once belonging to the church, now sits in the graveyard of St Mary's at Barndarrig, several miles away in the Ballinacor West townland. Its removal at some unrecorded point in the past speaks to the long, slow process by which a living place of worship becomes a ruin, its furnishings dispersed to wherever they might still be of use.
The church itself is a nave and chancel building, meaning it had a rectangular congregational hall joined to a smaller sanctuary at the east end, the two parts here appearing to be contemporary with one another despite a modern wall now dividing them. It is built of roughly coursed rubble and sits on a gentle south-facing slope above the valley of the Potters River. The west gable survives to its original height of five metres and retains an unusual protruding door portal, a feature that may well be original rather than later alteration. The north wall of the nave stands to near full height, between 2.9 and 3.1 metres, with a single break that may mark a former window or door opening. The south side of the nave has fared less well, with only a small stretch remaining at the western end, and of the chancel only the north wall still stands. Outside the southwest corner of the church sits a granite bullaun stone with an oval basin; bullaun stones are bowl-like hollows carved or worn into rock, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes with healing traditions. The church occupies a roughly circular graveyard of about sixty metres across, bounded by an earthen and stone bank that represents the original enclosure. A flat-bottomed natural gully runs outside this boundary to the east, where part of the bank was replaced by a mortared stone wall, probably in the nineteenth century.
Two graveslabs dated to 1723 survive within the church walls, and a substantial collection of eighteenth-century headstones fills the surrounding ground, suggesting the site remained in active use as a burial place long after the church fabric had begun to deteriorate. The bullaun stone, still in place outside the southwest angle, is worth finding; these objects are easily missed if you are not looking for them, but tend to reward a close look.