Religious house, Errill, Co. Laois

There are no walls, no arch, no carved stone to arrest the eye; just a low earthen scarp, roughly 54 metres to a side and a metre or so in height, enclosing level ground where foundations have long since vanished. Beneath it, according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, there is a vault or chamber, its entrance on the east side of the south-east angle, now filled in and inaccessible. The field itself was known locally as the Bawn, a word that typically refers to a walled or enclosed yard associated with a fortified house, though here it seems to have carried the older memory of a monastic enclosure.

The site is traditionally linked to St Kieran, one of the so-called Twelve Apostles of Ireland, who is said to have passed through this part of Laois after leaving Fertagh, turning northward and pausing at Errill long enough to found a monastery. Carrigan recorded that even by his time the enclosing wall, which he described as strongly and firmly built of stones and grouting, had almost entirely disappeared, with only fragments surviving at the four corners. The 1841 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map still marked the site as a friary, preserving a designation that had apparently persisted in local knowledge even as the physical remains dwindled to almost nothing. A medieval church survives in the landscape about 220 metres to the south-east, suggesting that this corner of Laois retained some religious significance across several centuries.