Bohola Church, Bohola, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
What survives of the old church at Bohola is a small roofless square of mortared sandstone and limestone, sitting near the summit of an oval hillock enclosed by a graveyard wall.
The building is modest, roughly six metres by five and a half, and its walls are thickly covered in ivy on both faces. A doorway in the east wall faces a narrow window set into a deeply recessed embrasure in the west wall directly opposite, a functional alignment that would have drawn a thin blade of light across the interior. Inside the northwest corner, a low setting of stones marks out a rectangular area that may be a grave plot, though no marker is visible. There is also a small recess in the south wall, the kind sometimes used for holding a lamp or a devotional object. None of this, on its own, would be especially remarkable, except for one detail: by 1838, when the Ordnance Survey first mapped the area at six inches to the mile, a considerably larger east-west church stood here too, with the surviving square structure shown as an extension at its northeast angle. Later map editions show only the square building, annotated as being in ruins. Whatever the larger church was made of, or whenever it fell, it has left no visible trace.
The hillock itself adds another layer. Forty metres to the north stands a motte, the flat-topped earthen mound associated with early medieval and later Norman defensive or administrative use, typically constructed by raising a substantial heap of earth and crowning it with a timber fortification. The proximity of a church and a motte on adjacent elevated ground in rural Mayo points to a landscape that was once far more deliberately organised than it appears today. The east wall of the ruined building is noticeably taller than the west, built up to compensate for the natural slope of the hill, a practical adjustment that also speaks to the care taken in its original construction. The walls themselves are of roughly coursed stone, uneven in size and shape, suggesting repairs or additions over a long period rather than a single build. Whatever sequence of events reduced the larger church to nothing while leaving this smaller structure partially standing is not recorded.