St Joseph’s R.C. Church, Glenedra Road, Fincarn, Feeny, Co Londonderry, BT47 4TW

St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church is a late 19th-century Gothic style building on Glenedra Road in Fincarn, near Feeny, County Londonderry. Built in 1889 to designs by architects McLaughlin and Conroy, it replaced an earlier Roman Catholic chapel that had stood on the eastern side of the present graveyard. The earlier building, recorded on the 1830 Ordnance Survey map as a T-plan chapel, was described in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs as "a good substantial building in perfect repair in a cruciform shape but wanting one of the transverse arms" with dimensions of 60 feet by the transverse arm of 35 feet by 18 feet. That building had been erected around 1754 and was thatched until recently being slated. At the laying of the foundation stone on 9th July 1888, Parish Priest Rev William O'Donnell announced the new church would be "a plain substantial building of rectangular form built in the Gothic style of architecture" measuring 90 feet long, 35 feet wide and 42 feet high to the apex of the roof.

The building comprises a step-pitched gabled and slated nave with a projecting entrance porch and a two-storey rear sacristy block, all smooth rendered and painted. The west front is gabled with a protruding gabled porch. Pointed and chamfered door openings flank each side, each fitted with a pair of hardwood panelled doors, also pointed. The gable contains two small pointed lancets with splayed reveals and sloping cills filled with decorative glass. Overhanging barge stones with gabled kneelers and a small moulded corbel sit beneath, with a small pedestal for a metal cross at the apex. Metal box gutters rest on moulded corbels. A smooth plaster plinth with splayed top edge runs around the base, with a flight of five steps in quadrant arrangement leading to each door. On the nave gable are two small pointed lancets with decorative glass. Above the porch ridge is a traceried rose window with a central trefoil encompassed by eight quatrefoils. The rose window and small lancets are probably trimmed with sandstone, now painted. Just below the cill line of the main gable lancet is a bold high plinth with splayed top edge continuing round all nave walls but not the sacristy. The main gable has similar barge, kneelers and cross as the porch. The nave walls, five bays long, each contain five pointed windows without glazing bars and plastered cills without drip moulds. Each window is filled with decorative glass and storm glazed with a condensation strip at the bottom. Box gutters are supported on moulded corbels. The roofs are slated with natural slates and simple clay ridge tiles. A lower smooth rendered plinth of the same height as the porch encompasses the entire church.

The sacristy block is one bay long and two bays wide, two storeys high, with walls set back a couple of metres from the nave walls on each side. Five steps lead up to a single door on the south side. The gable has two double hung sliding sash windows of eight panes at ground floor level and two more of equal size above. The gables of the nave and sacristy are similar to the others but without crosses; a former chimney survives on the sacristy gable. In the angle between the nave and sacristy on the north side is a shallow-pitched lean-to boiler room with a low masonry chimney. The church walls are probably built of stone and rendered with a paint finish.

The interior is dominated by a wagon-type ceiling and features sanctuary wall mosaics carried out around 1935, when the porch was also added. Originally, the nave lancets had Y tracery with good cast-iron rectangular Georgian panes. The building was renovated in the early 1980s when the cast-iron windows were replaced with the present glazing.

The graveyard extends around the church and includes entrance gates, piers, steps and a front boundary wall along the main road. The site includes a fine set of decorative metal gates with stone piers and a stone boundary wall, installed around 1935. Three priests' graves within the graveyard, possibly relocated from the former church, commemorate Rev John O'Regan, Banagher (died 13 February 1836), Rev John Murphy, Banagher (died 22 March 1847) and Rev Simon Peter Mulholland (died 14 May 1847). Another notable headstone records Patrick Duddy (died 23 June 1823) with incised drawings. The church sits close to the road at an oblique angle within the extensive graveyard. The site was once tree-clad but these were all removed in the 1960s, leaving a bleak landscape. The building exhibits alterations detracting from its original character and is a structure of local historical and social, cultural and economic importance to the parish.