Church in ruins, Glebe, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
What stops a visitor short at this site in Glebe, County Galway, is not the ruin itself but the evidence of a life lived inside it that the walls still quietly carry.
The church sits in the south-eastern quadrant of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a roughly bounded sacred precinct that predates the building itself, suggesting that this patch of ground had been set aside for religious purposes long before the late medieval structure was raised upon it. The building is rectangular, oriented east to west in the conventional manner, and measures 18.3 metres in length by 6.2 metres in width. Much of it survives in reasonable condition, though the eastern end of the north wall has gone entirely.
The detail that makes the interior worth reading carefully is the evidence of a vanished upper storey. Six corbels, stone brackets projecting from the wall face to carry timber, survive at the western end of the north and south walls and on the west gable. The grassed-over ghost of an internal dividing wall is still legible at ground level just west of the doorway. Together, these features point to a loft that once occupied the western portion of the building, a common arrangement in late medieval Irish churches where a gallery might serve a patron family or house an organ. The original doorway, which retains its pointed arch, opens roughly at the midpoint of the south wall. Windows along the same wall include two with round heads and one flat-headed single light. The west gable carries a further round-headed window, and the east gable holds a lancet window, the narrow, tall form associated with Gothic ecclesiastical building, now largely obscured by ivy. Immediately to the south of that eastern window is an aumbry, a small recess set into the wall for storing the vessels used in Mass, a detail that places the altar end of the church with quiet certainty.