FARIHY, parish in the barony of Fermoy, County of Cork, and province of Munster, six miles (W) from Mitchelstown, on the road to Doneraile … There is a considerable portion of mountain pasture in the north of the parish where it borders the County of Limerick, from which it is separated by part of the range called the Galtees. Two small oatmeal mills are worked by streams from these mountains, at the foot of which is situated Bowenscourt, the seat of HC Bowen, Esq.
In this entry from his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, which appeared in 1837, Samuel Lewis mentions the adjacent church of St Colman as a plain building with a tower then undergoing a “thorough repair”.
Bowen’s Court was swept from the Farahy landscape 65 years ago, but St Colman’s church, which is believed to have been built in 1721, remains. The Government’s Buildings of Ireland inventory lists it as an excellent example of a very rare early-18th-century Church of Ireland church in Co Cork with ”strong cultural links with the writer Elizabeth Bowen”.
In a letter Bowen wrote in the autumn of 1945 to Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat who was her lover for more than three decades, she reported that she had been decorating as harvest festival approached: “so our small rather musty church
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