St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, Brockaghboy, Garvagh, Co. Londonderry

St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church is a free-standing stone Gothic Revival church dated 1879, designed by J. O'Neill and W.H. Byrne of Belfast and Dublin, and situated on the north side of Glen Road in the townland of Brockaghboy, southwest of Garvagh. It is a well-preserved example of a late-Victorian rural Roman Catholic church, displaying proportions and detailing typical of the period, and set in largely unspoiled picturesque rural surroundings.

EXTERIOR

The building is rectangular in plan, with an L-shaped gabled entrance porch to the south, a gabled chancel projection to the east, and a gabled sacristy to the north. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles; the raised stone verges have kneeler stones and are topped by cross finials. There is a tall round ashlar sandstone chimney stack to the gable of the sacristy. Rainwater goods are cast iron with ogee profiles on bracketed overhanging eaves, with decorative brackets to the downpipes.

The walls are random squared stone with a chamfered sandstone plinth course and quoins, and buttresses with sandstone offsets. Windows throughout are cusped leaded lattice lancets set in sandstone blocked surrounds with chamfered reveals and sills, surmounted by stone voussoirs, except where noted otherwise.

The south elevation is four windows wide with the gabled porch positioned to the left. The gabled section of the porch is lit by a pointed-headed leaded lattice window with coloured glass to the right cheek. The entrance door to the north is accessed via three brick pavior steps with modern metal handrails fixed to the walls. The entrance consists of double-leaf timber-sheeted doors with a fixed timber-sheeted tympanum, set in a pointed-headed blocked and chamfered sandstone surround surmounted by a hood mould with plain stops and stone voussoirs. A central sandstone block above the door is carved with the date "1879". The porch is also lit by pointed-headed leaded lattice windows with Art Nouveau style coloured glass panels to the south and west.

The west gable features three staged lancets above three diminutive quatrefoil leaded openings, all in sandstone surrounds with stone voussoirs. The north elevation is five evenly spaced windows wide, abutted to the left by the cat-slide roof of the gabled sacristy. The east gable is almost entirely taken up by the chancel projection, which is itself abutted to the right cheek by the sacristy.

The sacristy has two sets of square-headed bipartite mullioned leaded diamond lattice windows to the east elevation. The west elevation of the sacristy has two pointed-headed leaded lattice windows with coloured glass to the left, and a shouldered sandstone doorcase containing a timber-sheeted door accessed by a sandstone step. The north gable of the sacristy is blank. The chancel is lit by three staged lancets to the gable and a cusped lancet to the left cheek.

INTERIOR

An entrance porch leads into the church, with stairs to the gallery on the left. A sacristy and boiler room lead off the chancel, which is positioned at the west end. The plan form of the building is unchanged from its original layout. Much of the stained glass and the Stations of the Cross were produced by Mayer and Co. of Munich. The baptismal font was made by C. Walshe of Ballymena and presented by the Hibernians of Glencullin in 1907. The bell was cast in 1926 by Matthew O'Byrne of the Fountain Head Foundry, Dublin, and presented to the church by Peter Mullan, a local man who had emigrated to the United States and returned for the dedication.

SETTING

The church stands on a rectangular mature plot with a graveyard containing headstones dating from the late 19th century, surrounded by a variety of mature trees. The site is bounded by roughcast rendered and rock-faced stone walls with cement saddleback coping and ribbon pointing. The entrance is laid with paviors and features original polygonal cast-iron piers with decorated caps supporting cast-iron gates with fleur-de-lis head finials. A modern shrine to the southeast corner of the site has a statue of the Virgin Mary in a round-headed niche and a devotional figure kneeling on a stone plinth. A modern primary school lies directly to the west and a replacement modern two-storey Parochial Hall to the east. The listing extends to the church, gates, and walling.

HISTORICAL NOTES

St Joseph's was built in 1879 in the Roman Catholic parish of Garvagh, also known as Glenullin. An earlier chapel in the nearby townland of Brockagh dated from 1775; it was an unpewed, thatched building recorded as being in bad repair in the 1830s in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs, and was reportedly the last thatched chapel in the diocese according to the Derry Journal reporting in 1885.

The Irish Builder announced the new church to designs by O'Neill and Byrne in March 1879. O'Neill and Byrne, practising from Belfast and Dublin, were designers of numerous Catholic churches and other ecclesiastical buildings in the 1870s and early 1880s, particularly in the north of Ireland and in the Dublin area. The contractor for the construction was G.R. Tipping. The church first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905, captioned "St Joseph's R.C. Church" in the townland of Brockaghboy.

The site was granted on a 999-year lease by Lady Garvagh, who also permitted building materials to be quarried from her estate. The foundation stone was laid in 1879 by Fr. McGeoghagan PP, assisted by Reverend Professor O'Brien of Maynooth, in the presence of a large gathering that reportedly included many of the local Protestant population; a collection taken on that day raised £250. A bequest of £300 in the will of a former curate of Glencullin, Fr. James McLaughlin (died 1884), together with £485 raised at a charity sermon and mass in 1885, allowed building work to be completed and the church was formally opened on 14th June 1886, though the flooring and seating were installed after this date. The formal opening is commemorated in a popular song transcribed by Sam Henry in the 1920s and 1930s. The church entered valuation records in 1879 at £40, with £10 for the graveyard. The size of the graveyard was increased slightly in 1911, but no other significant changes were recorded in the Annual Revisions. In the 1930s the church was revalued at £75, and valuers' notes of the period include a plan of the building, with the interior recorded as being in poor repair at that time. The church, gates, and walling were listed in 1977. In 2009 proposals were made to alter the church internally and add a small extension to the sacristy, but these plans remain unrealised.