Templenambraher, Pollaturk, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Churches & Chapels

Templenambraher, Pollaturk, Co. Galway

On the northern slopes of Knockacarrigeen in north County Galway, a ruined church sits within a small rectilinear graveyard, unremarkable at first glance, until you notice what is happening underfoot.

Immediately south of the graveyard wall lies a sink hole known as Pollaturk, a natural collapse feature formed where underlying limestone has dissolved and the ground above has given way. The church and its graveyard occupy a terrace beside this void, a detail that gives the site a quietly unsettled quality, the sacred and the geological in uncomfortable proximity.

The ruin itself measures twenty metres long and just under eight metres wide, oriented east to west in the conventional manner of Christian churches. It retains a separate sacristy at the east end and a flat-headed doorway at the west end of the north wall, surmounted by a false arch, an ornamental feature that mimics a structural arch without performing one. Three pointed windows pierce the north wall, a single similar window the south, and an alcove sits centrally in the west gable. Four corbels, the projecting stone brackets that once supported a timber frame, survive in the side walls near the west end, indicating that a loft once occupied this part of the building. A cross crowns the east gable. The place names offer an older layer still: both the site name and the neighbouring townland of Carrowntemple point to an ecclesiastical presence here long before the current ruin was built. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by John O'Flanagan in 1927 drawing on earlier nineteenth-century fieldwork, recorded a tradition of an old church that probably occupied the same ground as a later Roman Catholic chapel. Beneath the turf near the west wall, a foundation course of well-cut stones runs northward for roughly three metres but does not rise above the surface, suggesting the buried ghost of that earlier structure.

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