Ardnabara Abbey (in ruins), Cappaghnanool, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Religious Houses
What was once a roofed rectangular building on a ridge in County Galway has been reduced, over the course of a century or so of cartographic record, to little more than a raised outline in a field.
The place in question is known as Ardnabarra, from the Irish Ard na Barra, meaning the height of the top or summit, and it sits on an east-west running ridge among undulating pastureland near Cappaghnanool. What survives today is a roughly subrectangular earthwork, roughly 45 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, defined by a low degraded scarp that reaches about a metre in height at its best-preserved stretch to the south-southwest. Quarrying has disturbed the eastern end, and field clearance has done similar damage to the southwest.
The site's story, as far as it can be reconstructed, is one of gradual erasure. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map showed a rectangular roofed building on the site, aligned northwest to southeast. By the third edition, published in 1933, this had been downgraded to a simple notation of "Site of", with what appears to be a cillín recorded in its place. A cillín is an unconsecrated burial ground, typically used in Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial, and one appears to occupy at least part of Ardnabarra's footprint. The OS Letters, compiled by John O'Flanagan in 1927 from earlier nineteenth-century fieldwork, noted that the abbey "stood south of the road" and that its site was still visible at the time of writing. The scholarly reference work by Gwynn and Hadcock on medieval Irish religious houses also records the site. Within the earthwork, two possible internal subdivisions can be made out: a roughly square area at the eastern end, and a smaller subrectangular area to the southwest, the latter possibly corresponding to the cillín.
There is very little left to see, and what remains requires some patience to read in the landscape. The scarp is best preserved toward the south-southwest, where the outline of the enclosure is most legible against the surrounding pasture. The eastern and southwestern portions have been compromised by later agricultural activity, and without prior knowledge of what to look for, the site could easily be passed over entirely.