Dungarvan Church (site of)

On the S side of the NE-SW road through the village, roughly centrally placed within the medieval settlement, with the motte (KK024-068001-) c. 100m to the WSW and the castle (KK024-068008-) c. 50m to the NE. A church on glebe land is indicated on the Down Survey (1655-6) barony map of Gowran (Hibernia Regnum, courtesy of Trinity College Dublin). On the Down Survey (1655-6) parish map of Dungarvan the building at the same location is drawn as a castle, which may be a cartographic error or could be illustrating the residential tower of the church (ibid.).

According to Carrigan (1905, vol. 3, 417-18), ‘Previous to the Reformation the parish of Dungarvan was impropriate in the Priory of the Augustinian Canons of the Congregation of St. Victor, St. Catherine’s, Waterford City…The ancient parish church of Dungarvan was dedicated to St. David, Bishop of Menevia (March 1st)’. In 1615 the royal visitation recorded the church and chancel as in good repair (Manning 1998, 129). Carrigan (ibid. 418) relates that, ‘Its ruined walls were taken down, about 1811, to make room for a Protestant church, which has, itself, since become a ruin. It appears that the Protestant church was built partly on, and partly north of, the site of the old church, the south side-wall of the latter being 10 ft. [3m] south of the corresponding wall of the former’.

A drawing of the church by Austin Cooper, dated 1799, shows the church, with the adjacent castle (KK024-068008-) in the foreground (Manning 1998, 130). The illustration is described by Manning (ibid. 129) as consisting of, ‘a nave with a bell cot on its west gable like at Kilfane and a two-storey castellated structure at its east end with the chancel in its ground floor and accommodation above. A door is shown in the north wall of the nave to the east of which are two buttresses with another at the north-west corner of the chancel. A high east window is shown in the chancel and a window in the north wall serving the first floor. The parapets on the chancel were stepped up towards the corners’. The medieval church is not visible above ground.

Carrigan (ibid. 418), notes that, ‘Among the many monuments in the graveyard are about half-a-dozen coffin-shaped, uninscribed slabs, all with incised crosses, and some with carvings in relief of human heads’. Visible within the associated graveyard (KK024-068003-) there is an effigial tomb (KK024-068006-), a graveslab of head-slab type (KK024-068007-) and a tapering graveslab (KK024-068010-).