Church, Cloone, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Churches & Chapels
Three stone fragments propped against the north wall of a graveyard in County Leitrim are, at first glance, easy to walk past.
But these pieces, carved sections of windows and doorways with multiple mouldings, are what remains of a medieval church that otherwise left no standing walls, no tower, no visible outline in the ground. The rest is gone, and yet the site beneath the present graveyard in Cloone has been in continuous religious use for centuries, layer upon layer of activity compressed into a quiet field.
The Macheydan family, also rendered as MacKeehan in later sources, appear in records connected to the clergy here from 1406 through to 1522. They were coarbs, meaning hereditary ecclesiastical stewards responsible for the lands and functions of a monastic foundation, a role that in medieval Ireland often passed from father to son within a single kindred. The parish church of Cloone sat within the rectory of Regeles until 1472, after which it was absorbed into the rectory of Muinter Eolais, an administrative reorganisation that reflects the broader shifts in church governance across Connacht during the later medieval period. Two churches appear on the Down Survey maps of 1656 to 1658, the great Cromwellian-era cartographic project that recorded land ownership and ecclesiastical holdings across Ireland, and both are mentioned in the accompanying terrier, the written commentary that supplements the maps. That two churches were noted at all points to a more complex local picture than a single ruin might suggest. The first Roman Catholic church was built on what is thought to be the same ground as the earlier medieval parish church, continuing an association between this patch of Leitrim soil and organised worship that stretches back at least six hundred years.
The three surviving architectural fragments are displayed rather than simply left in situ, arranged along the north wall of the graveyard where they can be examined. Their multiple mouldings place them stylistically in the late medieval period, and while they give no complete picture of what the original building looked like, they are the only physical evidence that a dressed-stone structure once stood here at all.