Building, Cloneeb, Co. Laois
Co. Laois |
Utility Structures
At Cloneeb in County Laois, there is almost nothing left to see, and yet the ground itself tells a complicated story.
What survives above the surface amounts to a fragment of a south side-wall, within which a historian trained to look closely might once have made out the outline of a doorway leading to a sacristy and a credence, a small wall niche used to hold the vessels and wine for Mass. The church it belonged to ran to about 70 feet in full length. The graveyard beside it contains only two inscribed monuments, both from the nineteenth century, recent in the long arc of a site that was plainly active far earlier.
Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan described the place as having housed a monastery or friary at some point in the past, though he was cautious about the details. What caught his attention as much as the church remnant was what lay outside the graveyard wall, where he recorded considerable remains of foundations indicating that several buildings once stood there. That cluster of buried structures suggests an institution of some scale, a complex rather than a single modest chapel, though what order occupied it, when it was founded, and when it finally fell into ruin, the surviving record does not say. Since Carrigan's time, even those surface traces outside the wall have disappeared; current records note no visible remains at ground level.
The two elements Carrigan described, the partial church wall within the graveyard and the foundation traces beyond it, now exist largely as a matter of historical record rather than visible archaeology. The site at Cloneeb is one of those places where the interest lies less in what can be seen than in the gap between a once-functioning religious complex and the near-total silence it has since become.
