Church, Foyoges, Co. Sligo

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Foyoges, Co. Sligo

A loose east-west line of stones in the western half of a small graveyard in County Sligo is all that remains above ground of a church that was already a ruin four centuries ago.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a rectangular structure, roughly 25 metres by 7.5 metres, but whatever standing fabric survived into the nineteenth century has long since disappeared into the grass.

By the time of a Jacobean inquisition in 1619 to 1620, the building was described as "a ruinous cell or chapel called Templenefahoge", suggesting it had been out of use for some time even then. The name recorded in 1836, "Killamy", came with a telling detail: this was described as a burial place for children and strangers, a category of ground that in Irish tradition often served those who could not be interred in consecrated parish soil, including unbaptised infants. The graveyard at Foyoges thus carries two overlapping histories, that of an early ecclesiastical site and that of a liminal burial ground used by those on the margins of the formal church. A feature noted on the 1914 OS six-inch map as the "Bishop's Grave" lies approximately 30 metres to the north-east of the church site, though no physical trace of it is now visible at ground level. What can still be found there are praying stones, flat or rounded stones used for devotional kneeling or hand-touch prayer, a practice that often outlasts the structures it was originally associated with. Roughly 20 metres to the north-west lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement, hinting that the ecclesiastical remains here are part of a broader complex of activity in the surrounding landscape.

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