There has been a place of worship at Skibbereen since at least 1634, when records show a chapel here under the patronage of the Earl of Ossory. The present church is the second on its current site -- the first was built in 1827, costing IR£1,200, funded partly by a loan from the Board of First Fruits, the body that financed Church of Ireland building work across the country in the early 19th century. Construction was overseen by the rector, the Reverend Richard Townsend, in the plain old English style with a tower but no spire (the spire would come later, once funds could be raised). That first church served Skibbereen through the worst years a town has ever seen, in the late 1840s, when the population around it was dying in numbers that the buildings of West Cork can still scarcely contain. The current church replaced it in 1890.

Skibbereen became, during the Great Famine of 1845-1849, one of the names by which the catastrophe was recognised internationally. London newspapers sent correspondents and artists; the engravings of starving families published in The Illustrated London News in 1847 were, for many English readers, the first time the scale of what was happening became visible. The town and the surrounding parishes of West Cork were ravaged. Whole families died together in unroofed cabins; whole townlands emptied through death and emigration. The dead were brought to the Abbeystrewry burial ground by the cartload, and buried in deep trenches without coffins because there were no coffins to be had. The numbers are estimates because no one was counting -- somewhere between eight and ten thousand, in mass graves marked today by a single low stone. The grass grows over them. The wind off the Ilen comes up to meet you when you stand at the edge of the field.

The building work that has happened to Abbeystrewry Church since its 1890 completion is the slow, careful kind familiar to small rural parishes. In 2002 the parish hoped to acquire a peal of bells from St Nicholas' Church in Cork, which was being deconsecrated, but the bells turned out to be too large for Abbeystrewry's tower. New ones were commissioned from the Whitechapel Foundry in London -- the foundry that had cast Big Ben, the Liberty Bell, and (until its closure in 2017) most of the great bells of the English-speaking world -- and installed in the same year. The ring of six has rung over Skibbereen ever since. Abbeystrewry is part of a union of parishes within the Diocese of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross. As of recent years the rector has been Reverend John Ardis.

Abbeystrewry Church is the kind of building you walk past without taking much notice, on the road into Skibbereen from the west. The graveyard, less visible, is harder to walk past once you know what is in it. The Famine pits at Abbeystrewry are among the most important burial sites of one of the great catastrophes of European history, and the people in them were specific -- they were farmers and weavers and labourers, mothers and fathers and children, with names that mostly went unrecorded because the systems that record names had broken down. They had homes in this parish, in townlands whose names still exist on the Ordnance Survey maps, and they were buried here because there was nowhere else to bury them. The church above the town and the graveyard beyond it are two parts of the same memory. The bells in the tower are a continuation of something. The field is, too.