Church in ruins, Kinvarra, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
Between the rear garden of a modern house and the back wall of a business premises in Kinvara, Co. Galway, a medieval church sits on a wooded hillock as though the town simply grew around it and forgot to explain why.
Dedicated to St. Coman, the roofless limestone ruin measures roughly seventeen metres east to west and just under eight metres north to south. What makes it quietly odd is not its age but its situation: entirely enclosed by contemporary development, yet still containing its graveyard, its carved stonework, and, carved into the fabric of the south wall by an unknown hand, two small figures with pointed hats, both initialled WQ.
The church as it stands reflects at least two distinct phases of construction. The earlier dates to the early thirteenth century, identified through the diagonal tooling on the lancet windows in the east gable and south wall, and through traces of cyclopean masonry, that is, construction using very large irregular stones, in the lowest wall courses. The east window belongs to a regional tradition known as the School of the West, a style of ecclesiastical stonework associated with Connacht workshops of that period. The church was substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when a round-headed doorway and a two-light mullioned window with hood-moulding were inserted into the south wall. Three beam slots in both the north and south walls indicate that a timber loft once occupied the western end of the building. Burials within the church range from possible sixteenth-century examples to numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graves, and a seventeenth-century inscribed slab was recorded above a small alcove in the north wall. Rumours of a round tower stump on the site, noted by Gwynn and Hadcock in 1970, prompted a four-season programme of archaeological excavation between 2004 and 2007, funded by the Heritage Council; no evidence of an earlier foundation was found. The graffiti, however, remained unexplained: a smiling elfin face on a quoinstone, a full standing figure on the window reveal, both in the same hand, both marked with those two initials.