Religious house - Carmelite friars, Mohera, Co. Cork

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Religious Houses

Religious house – Carmelite friars, Mohera, Co. Cork

On the western edge of Castlelyons village in County Cork, the ruins of a Carmelite friary contain something easy to overlook underfoot: thirteen grave slabs laid across the choir floor, worn nearly smooth by centuries of weather and foot traffic.

Their foliated crosses are still legible if you look carefully, and they span a range from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. An earlier visitor, writing in 1918, counted only three and described one as bearing the unmistakable insignia of a blacksmith, another carrying a long graceful cross, and a third with a worn inscription dated 1614. Where the other ten came from, or when they arrived, is not recorded.

The friary was founded in 1309 by John de Barry, and what remains is a substantial complex: a nave whose walls still stand to near their full height, a choir and chancel separated from the nave by a three-storey tower, and the remains of domestic ranges arranged around a cloister to the south. The south range has vanished entirely. Most of the surviving architectural detail dates to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, though the ingoing of the east window, only a fragment of which survives, suggests the original east window may have been a tall multi-light design, a feature more typical of thirteenth-century work. The nave's west wall retains a fine central doorway with a pointed arch rebated in five plain orders and a hood-moulding above it, and directly over that sits a twin-light window with ogee heads, the curved S-shaped arch form common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings. A groined vault, a ceiling formed by the intersection of curved stone surfaces, once covered the space beneath the tower; only its northern third now survives. A spiral stairway in the tower's north-west corner still rises to full height.

The cloister garth, the open courtyard at the centre of the cloister, is defined today by a low rebuilt wall and three modern columns that gesture at the original arcading. The east and west domestic ranges are both two-storey, and details survive including a fireplace in the east range, window embrasures, and a doorway that probably once led to a garderobe, the medieval equivalent of a latrine, at the south-west corner of the west range. The Office of Public Works has carried out repair work here, and the site is a designated National Monument.

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