Nunnery (in ruins), Rusheens, Co. Galway

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Religious Houses

Nunnery (in ruins), Rusheens, Co. Galway

In the farmland at Rusheens, on a south-east-facing slope in County Galway, there is a place that has managed to disappear twice.

First the nunnery itself fell into ruin. Then the ruin vanished entirely, leaving not so much as a foundation course above the grass.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded a small rectangular building here, roughly twelve metres by eight, its long axis running north-west to south-east, already labelled as a nunnery in ruins. Beside it sat a cluster of small houses. By the time the third edition of the same map was revised in 1930, the building had gone so completely that the cartographers could only append the words "Site of" to the label. O'Flanagan, writing in 1927, noted the place in passing, but offered little more than the name. Who the women were who lived here, which order they belonged to, when the community was founded or when it dissolved, none of that has survived in the available record. The very modesty of the structure, a single modest oblong rather than a walled enclosure or a church with nave and chancel, suggests something small and local, perhaps a community that never grew large enough to leave the kind of documentary trail that larger houses did.

Today there is no visible surface trace. The slope is farmland, unremarkable to look at. The site exists now mainly as a cartographic ghost, a label on an old map pointing at empty ground.

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Pete F
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