Chapel (in ruins), Meelick, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
In Meelick, County Mayo, a chapel has disappeared so completely that the ground gives no sign it was ever there.
No wall stump, no scatter of dressed stone, no grassy outline; just a field that happens to sit inside an ancient enclosure, with nothing visible to mark what once stood at its centre.
The chapel appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, annotated simply as "Chapel (in ruins)", already gone to ruin by the time the surveyors passed through. It was a rectangular structure, roughly fourteen metres along its longer axis and six to seven metres wide, positioned at the centre of a rath. A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built as a farmstead or settlement boundary; the reuse of such enclosures for later religious buildings was not unusual in Ireland, where sacred or significant ground tended to accumulate meaning across centuries. By the time the next major survey edition appeared in 1931, the mapmakers no longer drew the building at all. In its place they noted only "Chapel (site of)", a cartographic acknowledgement that something had been there and was no longer. In the ninety-odd years between those two surveys, whatever remained of the structure had vanished entirely.