In Drogheda, on the mouth of the Boyne, within a day's walk of Newgrange, on ground that the earliest inhabitants of Ireland deemed to be sacred, is a quiet garden churchyard with a beautiful church. St. Peter's, "certainly among the best provincial churches erected in Ireland in the 18th century" is well loved and celebrated. Christine Casey and Alastair Rowan describe the west front a "a handsome Palladian design .... a broad eaves pediment broken by a great central tower rising above it through two stories".

The grey limestone, from the local Sheephouse quarry, is finely worked across the entire exterior. The spare classical clocktower with its Diocletian window and bracketed occulus, is topped and gracefully balanced by a  slender Gothic spire designed by Francis Johnson.

Inside is a delight of light and space, airy and open, well-lit by Victorian stained glass windows. There are galleries on three sides supported by slender columns of oak. The chancel has some superb rococo stuccowork, its convoluted whorls and garlands perfectly offsetting two significant mid-Eighteenth Century monuments. The organ, built by the famous John Snetzler, was a gift of Drogheda Corporation in 1770.

For two years this church stood empty and unused, the victim of an arson attack in 1999 (click here for an image of the inside of the church following the attack), and still the restoration project continues.

Arthur Gibney - F.R.I.A. (R.I.P. 2006)

President, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts