Church of SS. Stephen and John (RC), Castleisland

Notes:

This striking church is situated on Church Street in Castleisland where it overlooks the River Maine. Designed in a Gothic revival style by the Cork architect Dominic Coakley (d. 1914), it was erected to replace an older thatched church and built in a number of phases, commencing in 1881, by two builders. Firstly the Cork building firm Butler Brothers was engaged but they went bankrupt a year later and the main church was completed by John Sisk, also of Cork. The tower and spire is a later addition and was erected in 1910 once funding had become available; this may be to the design of R.M. Butler or may be that of Coakley. In many churches in Ireland the spires were not built due to difficulties in raising money and these churches appear stunted without them. This is not the case with Saints Stephen and John’s where the spire reaches to just over 50 m in height.

Externally the walls are in two Mississippian limestones: a pale grey fossiliferous variety is used for the dressed and carved stonework and best examined at the entrance doorway where its mottled and blotchy texture is evident, and the second is a darker flintier stone which has been left rough in the snecked walls. While the sources of these limestones remain as yet undocumented it is likely that they were extracted from quarries between the town and Tralee. The pale stone is possibly a Waulsortian limestone, which developed as mud-mounds on the seabed, and the darker stone was a deeper water deposit.

This church is significant for the use internally of Castleisland Marble, which was employed for the first time ever in this location. The local parish priest was made aware of the stone and saw its potential for decorative application. Subsequently, a quarry was opened 3 km southwest of the town at Lisheenbaun, which was operated by Edward Shanahan. The orangey-red Mississippian lime conglomerate takes a good polish and so is often referred to as a marble. It consists of lumps of pale calcite set into a matrix of streaked orange to red muds. In places small circular or bolt-like fossils can be seen; these are the remains of the stems of sea lilies, animals related to sea urchins, which lived attached to the sea floor. Castleisland Marble is used for the bases of the nave columns, the pilasters that decorate the chancel arch, colonnettes in the chancel, the doorframes in the upper nave, and the base of the baptismal font. Aside from the Lisheenbaun Quarry the red limestone was also raised in lesser volumes from some other local quarries, as recently as the 1970s.

The stone used for the polished nave columns is a surprise in that it is an unusual but highly distinctive granite from Shap in Cumbria. While widely used in England it is not often encountered in Ireland. The stone is a typical granite composed of interlocking crystals of glassy quartz, dark small micas, and feldspars. The latter are pink in colour, very large and well dispersed in the finer-grained matrix. Some columns are twinned, consisting of a larger diameter shaft alongside a secondary thinner column. All of the columns support decorative carved capitals and the rings of the arches are of Bath Stone.

The carvings in the church were produced by Charles W. Harrison, one of the foremost sculptors of his generation who operated a stone and marble works on Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street) in Dublin. The altar was carved in Cork by Samuel Daly and exhibited at the Cork Exhibition 1883 before its installation.