Abbey in ruins, Kill, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Religious Houses

Abbey in ruins, Kill, Co. Mayo

On the southern slope of a prominent ridge in County Mayo, a cluster of ivy-clad walls rises from the pasture, enclosed within a low boundary wall whose original western gateway still stands.

The site is now surrounded by a graveyard, and the buildings are heavily overgrown, which gives the ruins a quality of slow disappearance rather than dramatic collapse. What survives is nevertheless substantial: the footprint of a church, a side chapel, and several ancillary structures, all belonging to a Franciscan friary historically known as Killeenbrennan.

The friary was founded before 1428 for the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, a branch of the Franciscan movement whose members lived in community under a rule but were not necessarily ordained clergy. It was granted to a Thomas Lewis on 5th April 1574, as the Elizabethan suppression of religious houses worked its way through Connacht. The church itself is a substantial structure, measuring approximately 21 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west internally, entered through a west doorway above which sits an ogee window, the curved, S-shaped arch form associated with late medieval Irish ecclesiastical building. At the east end lies a late medieval grave slab. To the south, a side chapel is accessed through the remains of a round arch; it contains its own ogee window and a piscina, a small stone basin set into the wall where the priest would rinse the chalice after Mass, built into the south gable. To the north of the church stands a rectangular two-storey building whose ground floor has accumulated a considerable depth of earth over the centuries, with narrow windows still visible in the walls.

The site sits within a working pastoral landscape, and a field system of probable historic origin lies immediately to the east. The ruins are enclosed and the original gateway on the west side is the natural point of entry, giving a sense that the precinct boundary has retained some of its integrity even as the buildings within it have yielded to vegetation and time.

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Pete F
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