Church, Moylough More, Co. Galway

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Church, Moylough More, Co. Galway

In a field in north Galway, on a barely perceptible rise in pastureland, a Protestant church has effectively vanished.

Only its foundations remain, tracing a rectangle roughly fifteen and a half metres long and just under six metres wide, oriented east to west in the manner of Christian churches since the early medieval period. There was once a doorway in the west gable, and possible traces of a transept at the eastern end, but none of this is visible above ground today. The graveyard that surrounds the spot is still there, and has grown considerably since it was mapped in 1931, when it appeared as a roughly oval enclosure of about sixty by forty metres. The church inside it, however, has gone.

What makes the site stranger still is that the vanished building was itself a replacement. According to John Claffey, writing in 1983, the late eighteenth-century Protestant church was constructed on top of an earlier church site, one that predated it by an unknown span. That earlier structure left no surface trace either, so the ground here holds at least two successive layers of religious use, neither of them now legible to the eye. The oval shape of the original graveyard enclosure is itself suggestive of early Christian origins; early Irish ecclesiastical sites frequently feature curvilinear enclosures of this kind, their rounded outlines thought to reflect the boundaries of the original monastic or pastoral settlement. About a hundred and ten metres to the west-northwest stands a hall-house, a medieval residential structure of a type common to Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland, typically a first-floor hall raised above a ground-floor undercroft, which suggests the wider area had some significance across several centuries.

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