Church, Eyrecourt Demesne, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Eyrecourt Demesne, Co. Galway

On the grounds of Eyrecourt Demesne in east Galway, a church once stood that had already vanished so completely by the time anyone thought to look for it that not a single local person could remember having seen it.

No walls, no foundations visible above ground, no folk memory of its physical form. Only a name survived: Cillín íthe, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century collection of topographical and antiquarian observations gathered during the mapping of Ireland. Even that name pointed to something older and harder to read than a simple parish church.

When Fr. Egan investigated the site, it was a resident of the gatehouse who pointed him toward the spot, roughly 200 metres to the west of Eyrecourt House, on a slight rise in the landscape. A mature ash tree to the north was identified locally as the place where the church's font lay buried. Stations, a form of communal outdoor prayer traditionally performed at sacred sites, had been held at the location within living memory, which suggests the place retained religious significance long after any physical structure had gone. What Egan found on the ground was ambiguous but suggestive: a series of bumps and hollows, a rectangular sunken area measuring approximately 20 metres east to west and 18 metres north to south, and a stony mound near the summit of the rise. Any one of these features could mark what remains of the church beneath the soil, though none is conclusive on its own.

The site sits within the demesne of Eyrecourt House, so access is not straightforward, and there is little to see that would be immediately legible to the casual eye. The surface irregularities are the kind that can look like natural variation in the ground until you know what you are looking for. The ash tree, if it still stands, is perhaps the most tangible connection to the layers of local knowledge that kept the memory of Cillín íthe alive even after the building itself had disappeared entirely.

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