Rosshill Abbey (in ruins), An Choill Bheag Íochtair, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
Beneath the ivy that has crept across the west gable of this ruined medieval church in County Galway, there is a belfry and a window that the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded in the nineteenth century.
You would not know it now. The vegetation has consumed both features entirely, leaving only the bare outline of a building that once served as a functioning place of worship and has since been quietly reclaimed by the landscape around it.
The church itself sits near the centre of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting that Christian activity on this site predates the standing structure by some considerable time. Such enclosures, typically circular or oval in plan, are a common signature of early medieval Irish monastic foundations, often established centuries before any stone building was erected within them. The church measures roughly twenty-one metres in length and just over six metres in width, oriented east to west in the standard liturgical fashion. Its south wall retains two doorways and a broken window; the west gable holds a trabeate doorway, meaning one formed with a flat horizontal lintel rather than an arch. A small window survives in the north wall, and a broken doorway at the east end once opened into a sacristy, the small room traditionally used for storing vestments and sacred vessels, now itself ruined. Inside, a later dividing wall cuts across the interior, its doorway subsequently blocked, pointing to some reorganisation of the space at a date after the original construction. Purefoy Colles noted the site in 1870, and the Ordnance Survey correspondence compiled by O'Flanagan in the 1920s captured details of the west gable that are no longer visible to the naked eye.