The small chapel at Toomaghera, sitting close to a road on a stretch of level ground in County Clare, is said to have held on rather longer than most. Local tradition holds that it was the last thatched chapel in Ireland, a distinction so specific and so quietly remarkable that it is easy to overlook what it actually implies: somewhere in this unremarkable patch of east Clare, a form of vernacular Catholic worship architecture survived more or less intact well past the point when it had vanished everywhere else.

When inspectors examined the building in 1998, they identified it as a late eighteenth-century chapel. That period places its construction in the decades following the gradual relaxation of the Penal Laws, when Catholics in Ireland were beginning to build more permanent places of worship, though often still in modest, low-profile forms. Thatch was the natural roofing material of the time and place, cheap, locally sourced, and requiring no specialist materials. That this particular building retained its thatch into the late twentieth century, while virtually every comparable structure had been altered or lost, is what makes the Toomaghera chapel worth pausing over. It had been recorded under the category of "Chapel" in successive archaeological surveys through the 1990s, which suggests it was already recognised as something worth documenting before its extraordinary local reputation was formally noted.