Building, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Utility Structures

Building, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

A low scatter of mortared limestone, its walls reduced to just two or three courses above the ground, this small rectangular building survives more as an outline than a structure.

What makes it quietly remarkable is not what remains but what it has been absorbed into: the ancient monastic complex on Inis Mór known as na Seacht Teampaill, or the Seven Churches, one of the most significant early Christian sites in the west of Ireland. The building measures roughly 8.7 metres along its longer axis, and somewhere within that modest interior, three limestone blocks mark what appears to be a burial, a detail easy to miss but hard to forget once noticed.

The complex that surrounds this building drew scholarly attention as far back as John Waddell's 1973 survey, where the structure was catalogued as Building E, and it appears again in Paul Gosling's 1993 work on the area. The building sits approximately twelve metres to the north of Teampall Bhreacáin, also known as Temple Brecan, one of the larger and better-preserved churches on the site, and immediately to the north-west of a neighbouring building with which it shares a bonded wall at the south-east corner. That bonded junction, where the east end of the southern wall is physically tied into the adjacent structure, is the best-preserved section remaining, standing to a height of around 0.64 metres. The north-east wall, by contrast, is largely grassed over and partially removed. The principal reason the building is so poorly preserved appears to be straightforward and a little ironic: the main access path to Teampall Bhreacáin runs directly across its western end, meaning centuries of feet, and presumably earlier centuries of more deliberate stone removal, have worked steadily against it.

Visitors walking to Teampall Bhreacáin will pass over the western end of this building without necessarily realising it. Looking north from the main church, the low remnant walls become visible once you know to look for them, and the three limestone blocks marking the interior burial are worth pausing over, set as they are into ground that would once have been enclosed by standing walls.

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