Boho Parish Church, Carrickbed Road, Boho, Co Fermanagh

Boho Parish Church

Boho Parish Church is a freestanding Church of Ireland hall-and-tower type church, built in 1777, set within a churchyard on the east side of Carrickbeg Road, Boho, in the townland of Farnaconnell. It is a simple, diminutive building highly representative of early Board of First Fruits church typology, and is of architectural, historical, and social interest. The architect is recorded as J. L. Donnelly. The listing extends to the church itself, the boundary wall, and the pedestrian gate piers.

Exterior

The church is rendered in roughcast over limestone rubble construction, with a pronounced batter to the north gable and belfry tower. It sits on a raised foundation plinth that diminishes toward the north end. The pitched roofs are covered in natural slate throughout, but have been raised at some point, and ghost marks of the original roof level remain clearly visible in the render to the north gable and east elevation. The eaves are deep and overhanging, formed in painted timber box construction with rendered soffits. Rainwater goods to the main body of the church are plastic profiled gutters with cast-iron downpipes; the vestry has plastic downpipes.

The nave is a simple rectangular form. Its south-west gable is abutted by a square-based, two-stage belfry tower. The tower is otherwise blank except for diminutive rectangular louvred openings to the upper stage. The belfry roof is concealed behind a simple parapet with plain stone coping, a string course to the upper stage, and pointed stone corner finials.

The principal entrance is located in the north-west cheek of the tower. It comprises a medieval pointed arched moulded stone door surround, thought to have been relocated from the pre-Reformation church that once stood on the site of the nearby Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Chapel a short distance to the north. This doorcase is currently obscured beneath layers of plaster, which has been incised to resemble stonework, and is set on plinth blocks. The door itself is oak timber, sheeted, ledged and braced, with a woodgrained finish and simple ironmongery.

Window openings to the nave are semi-circular headed with plain reveals and concrete cills. The vestry has a square-headed window opening. Both the nave and vestry windows are fitted with leaded lattice glazing with coloured glass panes. The north window has small stained glass insets, as does the north-east gable window of the vestry. Belfry openings are rectangular with timber louvres. The north-east gable also has a diminutive segmental arched opening to the apex with timber louvres, and an original cast-iron sub-floor ventilation grille at low level. The south-east elevation has three equally spaced windows.

The north-west elevation is abutted by the vestry and is otherwise blank. A small lean-to shed abuts to the north.

Vestry

The original vestry outshot to the north-west is a simple rectangular form that has been extended to the north-west and refurbished around 2012, when a kitchen and toilets were added. The entrance to the south-west is a uPVC door beneath a gablet. An original cast-iron sub-floor ventilation grille survives to the lower right side of this elevation. The north-west side is lit by a uPVC window, while the north-east side retains an original coloured glass leaded lattice window. The render shows a distinct break at the point where the roof level was raised.

Interior

The liturgical arrangement, while not thought to be original, is unusual for a former Established Church building in that it follows Calvinist principles: the holy table is positioned against the east wall and ministration takes place from the north side. It is likely that the pulpit was originally centrally positioned in front of the holy table. The raising of the roof has resulted in the loss of the original ceiling.

Historical Background

The church was built in 1777 with a grant of £200 from the Board of First Fruits, and was subsequently repaired with £157 10s given by their successors, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, in 1830, as recorded by Lewis. Lewis described the church as "plain" and noted that the glebe comprised 142 acres but that there was no glebe house at the time of his visit. By the time of the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1834–35, the rector was the Reverend Mr Porteous and a small glebe house had been built nearby. The Townland Valuation of the late 1830s recorded the church as 46 feet long, 26 feet wide and 15 feet high, and noted a "Belfry House" — presumably the tower — as being "just roofed". The second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1862 shows a rectory just north of the church, with the surrounding land occupied by the Reverend Mark Whitaker, who remained rector until his death in 1898. The church was valued at £6 in Griffith's Valuation of 1862, rising only to £7 5s in 1903 following the establishment of the graveyard.

The church is thought to incorporate a medieval doorcase from a pre-Reformation church previously located on the site of the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church. That earlier church is believed still to have been in existence in 1603 when it was recorded in the Inquisition. The medieval doorcase is individually scheduled as a monument.

The church appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1835 in its current simple rectangular form, within a tree-bounded enclosure closely matching what survives today. By the third edition map of around 1900, this enclosure is marked as a graveyard.

Setting

The church occupies a sloping, wedge-shaped site on high ground overlooking the surrounding countryside and Lough Erne to the east, with views also over Lough Ross. The churchyard, which contains 19th and 20th-century memorial monuments to the south-east, is planted with yew trees and bounded by mature tree planting to the north-east and south.

The road to the west is elevated above the site. The boundary to this side is a rubble stone wall, rendered on the road elevation, with a stile of three steps to the right of the pedestrian entrance. This entrance comprises a pair of replacement cast-iron gates supported on slender stop-chamfered octagonal stone piers with ball finials. Steps down to the church and perimeter pathways are poured concrete. A second gated entrance at the narrow south-west end of the site comprises a pair of steel gates on roughcast rendered piers with a First World War memorial plaque dated 2012. A monopitched rubble stone-faced store, dated 2011, is built against the inner face of the boundary wall near the south-west gate.

While the church's picturesque setting and original boundary features enhance its character and group value considerably, various unsympathetic refurbishments — including the raising of the roof, the loss of the original ceiling, and modern interventions to doors, windows and the vestry extension — have detracted from its architectural integrity.