Ballytrustan Church ruin

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Now completely overgrown ruin of a small rectangular gabled church (c.18m x 7m) set within a small graveyard to the N of the Ballyfounder Road, roughly one mile SE of Portaferry.

Due to the masses of greenery nothing of the ruin is visible and it is difficult to even discern the present height of the walls, however, from the 1966 'Archaeological Survey of County Down' we do know that the church was built of ‘split stone rubble and boulders with rough dressed quoins’ with various windows with ‘splayed ingoings, sloping cills and rebuilt jambs’.

The graveyard has an assortment of (mainly RC) headstones dating at least to 1720 with many others now illegible from much earlier times. As a burial ground it appears to have been largely abandoned in the middle of the 19th century. The church and graveyard surrounded by a low rubble wall.

Historical information

This church may date from the mid 13th century or slightly earlier. It is recorded in Papal taxation records of 1294 as the church of ‘Thurstaynistone’ (i.e. Thorstein's town or Ballytrustan), and at that stage belonged to the Knights Hospitallers of St. John. In 1397 King Richard II gave the lands of ‘Thurstayntone' to Richard Russell, but in 1605 and 1622 Ballytrustan was still declared as belonging to the Knights of St. John. The church appears to have been abandoned in the 17th century, but the graveyard remained in use until the mid 1800s.

References- Secondary sources
1 St. Patrick’s Church Ballyphilip 1762-1962 [Souvenir booklet] (Portaferry, 1962), p. 89
2 'Archaeological Survey of County Down' (Belfast HMSO, 1966), pp. 299-300
3 G. Philip Bell, C.E.B. Brett, Sir Robert Matthew, 'Ulster Architectural Heritage Survey: Portaferry & Strangford'
(Belfast UAHS 1969), p. 22
4 R.S.J. Clarke (compiler) 'Gravestone Inscriptions Vol.13, County Down, Barony of Ards' (U.H.F. Belfast [?1975]), pp. X, 76-84

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Overgrown ruins of a mediaeval church possibly built in the mid 1200s. There is a surrounding graveyard with headstones dating mainly fom the 18th and early 19th centuries.