Architect:
Interior Access
The most interesting feature of Laragh is the 19th century church for the Church of Ireland. It is said that it was brought back to Laragh by the mill owner and his wife from their honeymoon in Switzerland where she saw and fell in love with it. Designed in a swiss-gothic hybrid style, the church is contructed entirely out of corrugated iron and sites in a small narrow wooded valley alongside the river.
The spire of the church is very ornate and in three stages and cuts an incongruous outline in county Monaghan. In comparison to the grim earnestness and solidity of other churchs in villages in the county, this has a picturesque fragility and frivolity not usually found in small industrial villages and must have astounded the locals when originally constructed and brightly painted. One of the more interesting questions that comes to mind, is what was it like attending a service during a heavy rain storm?
The landscaping around the church is designed to imitate and suggest a small mountain glade with rocky outcrops around the church. To ensure that no regular edges exist other than the chapel itself, rocks and stones have been built around the chapel in mounds to create crevices and and irregular outline to the raised platform on which the church sits. Even the gateway has received this treatment to ensure the victory of the picturesque over practicality in this little outpost of the Industrial age.