Building, Abbey, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Utility Structures
Just south of the Cistercian abbey at Corcomroe, in County Clare, sits a rectangular stone building that nobody can quite explain.
It lies roughly twenty metres from the abbey complex itself, close to the south-west corner of the graveyard, and its purpose remains genuinely uncertain. That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting. Three doorways survive in its walls, the rubble inside climbs to a metre above the surrounding ground level, and a later dividing wall was inserted at some point without being properly bonded to the existing stonework, suggesting the building was adapted, repurposed, or simply altered in ways that left no written record.
The structure measures nine metres east to west and six metres wide, with mortared stone walls nearly a metre thick. The doorway at the eastern end is framed in well-dressed stone and stands two and a half metres high, suggesting a degree of care in its original construction. The doorway on the north wall, by contrast, is more roughly built, fitted with a crude supporting arch and a hanging eye, the kind of iron fitting used to hang a gate or door, and it has been partially blocked at some point. A third doorway sits directly opposite in the south wall. The interior dividing wall, which projects from but is not bonded to the inner face of the north wall, points to a later phase of use, though what that use was is unclear. Two further buildings, slightly smaller, once stood nearby to the south-east, but these appear only on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map and have since disappeared from view. Corcomroe Abbey itself was a Cistercian foundation in the Burren, and the wider monastic precinct would have required a range of practical outbuildings, but this structure and its neighbours have never been firmly assigned a function.