St Cadan’s C of I Church, Duncrun Road, Magilligan, Limavady, Co Londonderry

St Cadan's Church of Ireland, Duncrun Road, Magilligan

St Cadan's is a good example of a mid-Georgian Gothic church with later Victorian additions. It demonstrates the distinctive use of windows only on the south wall, a feature common to churches of this period and style.

The church is a small "planter's Gothic" building constructed of rubble basalt. The nave measures 19½ metres by 8 metres internally and is accompanied by a shallow chancel and a projecting small north-west vestry. The building is three bays long and features a tall pointed entrance door at the west end, approached by a flight of seven steps.

The dominating three-stage tower is the principal feature. It is fitted with shallow clasping buttresses that terminate in stepped crenellations, with each stage defined by plain string courses. The second stage is decorated with three small Y-traceried windows, while four large pointed and louvred openings mark the belfry stage. On either side of the tower stand small crenellated blockhouses—one containing the gallery staircase and the other a small store—each with sandstone-trimmed pointed windows. The west-facing windows of these blockhouses are blank.

The south wall of the nave contains three large Y-traceried windows subdivided with small rectangular glazed panes and railway track astragals at the top, widely spaced. The north wall has three equivalent blank windows with sandstone surrounds, except at the vestry where it has been built up. The east end of the chancel features a large stone-traceried three-light window with sparse cusping.

The roof is covered in Welsh slates in two different pitches, with a tiny squat minimalist chimney on the north end of the nave roof and barge stones capping the chancel gable.

The church was built in 1784 by Lord Bristol to replace the earlier church of Tamlaghtard, which had fallen into decay. The chancel and vestry were added in 1861 under the direction of Ecclesiastical Commissioners' architects Welland and Gillespie, likely at which time the gallery and the crenellated excrescences on either side of the tower were also erected.

The building sits on a sloping hillside surrounded by a sizeable graveyard bounded by a stone wall. Access is gained via a path leading directly to the west door or through wrought iron gates between two sentinel-like stone piers from a laneway off Duncrun Road. The church is listed with its boundary wall.