Nothing Cheers Me Up More Than a Ruined Church

I never felt good in my childhood church of Our Lady of Victory, a post-war church built for the Catholics living in post-war subdivision. 

What a contrast to Ireland where you can find an ancient church every other mile. 



The Holy Cross church in Dunfanaghy has never gives me a good feeling, but the village's earlier church does:




The first Irish Christian churches were built between 500-700. Today, they are small and rare. Rare, because many of them were burned by Vikings in the 900s, or because a later church replaced it. 



This is the early medieval church on White Island, in Co. Fermanagh. The walls are reconstructed, but the arch was there when the Vikings arrived. 



Inside the ruined church, carvings of that era have been preserved. Scholars believe they decorated the bases of columns. (More here.)


Some people think this one is a Sheela-na-gig, but I don't. 








The Irish Catholic churches of those early middle ages—before the Norman arrived in the 12th century—is not the same Catholic Church that raised me. Their saints are not Roman Catholic saints. Irish Saints like Columcille and Fintan and Finbar and Gobnait were high-ranking Irish men and women who founded communes—I mean "abbeys"—organized around a religious practice which included creating libraries of books.  





The Roman Catholic Church arrived with the Normans in the early 1200s. The new people built churches on top of earlier Irish chapels. 





The Abby in Sligo. 

One of my favorite ruined churches is Muckross Abbey in Killarney.



Here's a photo of me taken in 2014 in the cloister at Muckross Abbey, where I always feel happy. That day was especially nice because little black mushrooms covered the ground under the yew. 




In the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants built their new churches on top of, or near, the ruins of Norman churches from the 1200s. Why were the Norman churches ruined? Because Protestants burned them down. 

In many villages there's a Protestant Church in the middle of town that's either empty, or converted to a pizza restaurant or concert venue. That's a Church of Ireland building there in the center of Glencolumcille. (Protestant churches usually have a rectangular bell tower.) The church is encircled by a Catholic pilgrim's path between more than a dozen "stations" around the valley. Sometimes a station is standing stone from the early Christian era, sometimes it's a tomb 3000 years old. 

Modern Catholics visit ancient monuments like those stations, or wells, or mountain tops, but they didn't get their churches back after gaining civil rights in the 19th century.  Their churches today are relatively modern.

The Catholic church in Creeslough is designed to look like Muckish, the mountain behind it. 




After the laws changed, the Catholic Church went on a cathedral-building spree in the early 1900s and lucky for us, the architectural movement at the time was neo-gothic. Here's St. Eunan's, the ancient-looking church in Letterkenny. 

This is how it looked shortly after construction, a hundred years ago. 



I wonder how it will look in 1500 years? 

The ruined church in Dunlewey at the top of this post was built as a memorial to the landlord and Church of Ireland chapel of ease. But 100 years later not enough people remained to keep the church going, so they removed its roof, donated the organ to another church, and left the stones to decay. 

When I am in Dunlewey, looking out over land and sea, I wonder if this hillside might be more beautiful without a pile of old stones on it. On the other hand, given that this is Ireland, there was probably another pile of stones here long before. 



There's a place in Inishowen called The Druid's Altar that gives us a glimpse of how the church at Dunlewey might look in 3000 years. 




The Druid's Altar is a "court tomb," but its ring of stones have long been repurposed into field walls. A better preserved court tomb is Cloghanmore, just south of Glencolumncille. Court tombs are 3000-year-old piles of stone which once enclosed a place for people to gather, like for a funeral. 

This drawing is a top-down view of what Cloghanmore might have once looked like. (From the Voices of the Dawn page about Cloghanmore.) 



Here's a photo which is more like what it feels like than looks like. 

And then there's Uragh Stone circle, the most beautiful church in Ireland, in my opinion. It's my favorite, where I feel the best.