Saint Bartholomew's Church - and indeed the majority of Victorian churches built throughout Ireland - would not have the hard-edged, stony and darkly Gothic appearance that is familiar to us today were it not for the career of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 – 1852), radical English architect and flamboyant convert to Catholicism, whose short career was to change completely the Victorian notion of what the perfect church should be.