Vintage View: Tarquin Blake's Abandoned Churches of Ireland
The ruin of a church is a quiet moment in the landscape. Even when the roof is intact, once de-consecrated, these buildings fall into a certain kind of poignant silence.
An occasional visitor will fight forward through the bramble-chocked graveyard with a wreath, but otherwise they remain largely undisturbed — towers and spires thrust in mute faithfulness to Heaven.
As the numbers in the Church of Ireland diminished during the latter half of the 19th century (Gladstone’s Irish Church Act took place in 1869, disestablishing the Church of Ireland tithes), many of the former parishes united in order to plump numbers at Sunday service. This inevitably left behind a scattering of poignant formerly sacred shells that once surrounded a worshipful audience.
Historian and photographer Tarquin Blake’s work has been described as that of architectural explorer, which conjures images of Bear Grylls swinging through the rafters with a Leica clenched between his teeth. Now living in Cork, Tarquin records what remains of a wide range of forgotten Irish buildings many in a state impending collapse.
His celebrated photographs pick out not just the vestiges of often remarkable architecture marinaded in damp, lichen and determinedly destroying ivy, but the writer has a talent for finding the softly speaking soul of a forgotten place. Largely this metaphysical quality is gifted in black and white pictures free of the chatter of colour, which can surrender line to too much loveliness.
His earlier books, Abandoned Mansions of Ireland (2010), Ancient Ireland (2013) and Haunted Ireland (2014), documented hundreds of buildings and this one takes on a division of our fallen heritage that has been all but ignored. Photography books (outside of fashion), are notoriously low on return, so what drew him to this work?
“A friend took me out to photograph some abandoned stately homes,” Tarquin says, “I made some amazing images and also had a wonderful time exploring the ruins. When I started researching the locations I found it a real challenge.
“Trying to piece together the history of the houses and their occupants was like a complex puzzle. The resultant photographs, accompanied by a fascinating story, seemed a very strong combination. I don’t really call it work though, it is more like a hobby or maybe an obsession. I have a normal day job to put bread on the table.”
What special feeling did he find in places of worship? “Ancient sites tend to be looked after, whereas the churches and domestic buildings are typically overgrown, tumble down ruins, maybe that way they are more fun to explore and photograph?
“I used to say exploring old buildings was a better adrenaline rush than hang gliding, with the fear of a wall falling on you, a foot going through the floor, or just being caught in some place you are not supposed to be.
“When I was photographing for my Abandoned Mansions books I was a lot more on edge. The churches were not really like that. I found them beautiful and peaceful places to visit.”
Surely getting records for elderly but relatively unimportant churches must have been a nightmare.
“Very difficult,” he replies, “the churches that were abandoned were those whose congregations dwindled away to nothing, they are typically very rural and in out of the way places. You really have to go looking for them to find them. Many church records were stored in the Public Record Office in Dublin, destroyed in 1922 in the Irish Civil War.
“In any case the church records really only contain long lists of marriages, baptisms and burials. Thankfully there were some surveys carried out in the first quarter of the nineteenth century which record the churches just after they were built.
“For other information I was scraping through newspaper archives and old books. I completed the photography in a year, just photographing at weekends, then the research, writing and photograph editing took about another year.”
Do some of these buildings rate protection and even restoration rather than stabilisation, or just leaving them alone?
“In my first book of Abandoned Mansions, I said that the position of the houses in the book was hopeless. Thankfully I’ve been proven wrong and four of the mansion houses in that book are in the process of restoration.
“In my Abandoned Churches book the majority of the churches are crumbling ruins, a few churches have been stabilised, one has been restored as a village community centre and one was in the process of being converted into a dwelling house. I believe most will be left to slowly crumble.”
Creeping over ragged open planks and under dodgy masonry —has he had any dodgy moments?
“Oh there have been a lot of those! I have fallen through plenty of floors and a fairly big wall collapsed on me.
“One of the scariest moments was in a vast ruined mansion house when I heard these huge heavy footsteps coming down a corridor, heavy breathing and other strange and very other-worldly sounds.
“After a few minutes of extreme fear I discovered it was actually just a donkey who had the whole run of the house as his stable!”
Does he have a favourite old church he photographed?
“Some are favourites just because they were visually stunning and the photographs were beautiful, like St Patrick’s on the book’s cover.
“Others, because of the setting — like at Mayo Abbey where the Rector’s glebe house and his farm buildings are all left crumbling, showing exactly what happened — services stopped, the church closed, the rector left, and nobody ever came back.”
As a keen photographer, I wonder if he has any special tips for picture-taking at ruined buildings: “Take control of your camera and learn to use it on the manual setting.
“All digital cameras have a screen on the back and you should look at every photograph that you take on that screen. If it’s not right then fix your setting and take it again and again until it is right.”
“Exploring is like a cross between Indiana Jones and Alice in Wonderland. It’s going to be an adventure finding the place, and you are going to be amazed when you get there.”
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