site of Catholic Church, Skecoor, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

site of Catholic Church, Skecoor, Co. Galway

In a field of undulating grassland near Skecoor in County Galway, overlooking marshy ground to the east, there is nothing left to see.

That absence is precisely what makes the place worth knowing about. Somewhere beneath the grass, or perhaps long since scattered by ploughing and weathering, lies whatever remained of a Catholic chapel, a building so thoroughly erased that by the time the Ordnance Survey came to record it, it was already a memory rather than a structure.

The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where surveyors noted "site of R.C. Chapel" in Roman script alongside a roughly trapezoidal enclosure they labelled "fort" in Gothic script, the convention used at the time to distinguish ancient or historic features. The enclosure was depicted with hachuring, the short radiating lines mapmakers used to suggest raised earthworks or boundaries. By the time a more detailed survey was carried out between 1912 and 1916 at the larger 1:2500 scale, the chapel site was still being marked, this time with the standard "Site of" symbol placed within the interior of that same enclosure. The chapel had apparently been sited inside, or immediately associated with, an older fortified or enclosed space, a not uncommon arrangement in rural Ireland, where pre-existing earthworks were sometimes reused for later religious purposes. Nothing visible survives at ground level today, leaving the 1838 map annotation as the most tangible evidence that a chapel ever stood here at all.

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