Boyle Abbey, Knocknashee, Co. Roscommon

The eight arches running along the north side of the nave are pointed, while those on the south side are rounded, and this is not the result of repair or accident. The difference records the passage of time, each arcade belonging to a separate phase of construction as the building grew between 1161 and 1220. Few Irish churches make their own construction history so legible from the inside.

The abbey was established by Cistercian monks who had originally left Mellifont in 1148 and spent several decades moving between sites before settling on the west bank of the Boyle river, on lands granted by the MacDermots of Moylurg. The Cistercians were a reforming order who prized austerity, and the scale of what they eventually built here, a church consecrated between 1218 and 1220, with a crossing tower added before 1300, and two daughter houses founded at Assaroe in Co. Donegal in 1178 and Abbeyknockmoy in Co. Galway in 1189 to 1190, suggests the community quickly became substantial. The abbey also served as the scriptorium for the Annals of Lough Cé, a major medieval chronicle compiled here over generations. Its later history was considerably rougher. William Burke seized the site in 1202, the building flooded in 1471, and although it appears to have survived the dissolution of the monasteries largely intact in 1569, a garrison was installed from 1585. The Cistercian cloister, the covered walkway enclosing a central garden, was converted into a bawn, a walled defensive enclosure, and new military structures were added. Irish forces besieged it in 1645.

What survives today includes the chancel and transepts in reasonable condition, the nave arcades with their mismatched arches, and the bawn walls with a restored two-storey gatehouse on the west side whose red-tiled roof is a reproduction based on evidence recovered during excavation. The north transept holds two medieval graveslabs worth seeking out: one, dating from the thirteenth century, depicts a bishop not by a figure but by a single carved hand holding a crozier, an unusually spare piece of funerary symbolism. Several further slabs, including one commemorating a person named Matheus, are kept in the old refectory building at the south-east corner of the site.