Kilcoo old graveyard, off Ballymoney Road, Ballymoney, Newcastle, Co Down

The site comprises fragmentary remains of a late medieval church and its associated, overgrown graveyard, located at the end of a lane west of the Ballymoney Road, approximately 4 miles southwest of Castlewellan and less than half a mile north of the village of Kilcoo. The church and graveyard are contained within an irregular enclosure, roughly square in plan but with a curved southern boundary. The enclosure is defined by a stone revetment wall, now topped with a modern fence of timber and concrete posts. A gate on the west side consists of a pair of square, rubble-built pillars with cement moulded pyramidal caps, and a 19th-century wrought iron gate. Little remains of the original rectangular church aside from fragments of rubble walls to the north, east, and west, now heavily overgrown. These walls stand to a maximum height of roughly 3 meters, suggesting the former building was approximately 18 meters long and 8.5 meters wide. Numerous headstones are scattered around the ruins, with the earliest legible dates from the 18th century. A short distance north of the enclosure are the remains of a circular rath enclosure.

Kilcoo, or the ‘Church of St Mochua’, was first documented in a taxation record of 1291, valued at one mark (13s 4d). The current ruins likely represent a later church, possibly constructed in the 15th century by Odo Magennis, the de facto lord of Iveagh. The church remained in use until the 17th century, but, as with many other Ulster churches, suffered from the civil unrest of the 1640s, leading to its abandonment and ruin by 1658. In 1712, its functions as a parish church were superseded by a new chapel of ease built by James Hamilton at Bryansford, although the graveyard continued to be used into the 19th century. The church ruins were described in the 1836 Ordnance Survey Memoirs as ‘plain’ and ‘not an object of interest to the antiquarian nor…at all picturesque’. The site is currently used as a graveyard and is recorded as derelict.