What is recorded here

That is the smallest church building still standing in Ireland. A man carved a wooden chapel into solid sandstone for St Tigearnach, probably in the ninth century, giving it finials and clerical figures before mortar or scaffolding became common. Crossmoyle people buried their dead beside it for centuries, then chipped it until it split in two. The graveyard wall holds the broken halves together now, preserving the shape of a room never built but believed real.

Wakeman (1875, 335) describes this feature as a single block of sandstone (dims 1.85m x 0.67m; H 0.94m), which is hollow and shaped into the form of a wooden house or church. It displays construction features such as barge-boards emphasising the junction of the gables and the roof and their extension into decorated finials. It has carvings of ecclesiastics on the gables and the walls, which are now very eroded. It was utilised in post-medieval burial rituals, and modern inscriptions have attempted to appropriate it to various factions with the result that it has split into two portions from rough treatment. It is probably the earliest surviving feature of St Tigearnach’s monastery, which could date to the period of the earliest stone churches in the ninth or tenth century, and it is now displayed inside the perimeter of the graveyard (MO011-010003-) at S. See the attached images _1 from S; _2 from SW Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of revised upload: 29 November 2016

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