Calluragh Chapel (in ruins), Newtown, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Calluragh Chapel (in ruins), Newtown, Co. Galway

There is a chapel recorded at Calluragh, in the gently undulating pastureland and scrubland of County Galway, that no longer exists in any visible form.

On the 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a small unroofed rectangular building, roughly twelve metres along its northwest to southeast axis and five and a half metres across, positioned at the southwestern tip of a graveyard. When surveyors came to verify the site, they found no trace of the structure at all, only dense thorn trees and briars described as almost impenetrable. A building that was already ruinous a century ago has since been consumed entirely by the landscape around it.

The chapel's earlier history is not documented in what survives, but its presence on the 1922 map, already shown as unroofed, suggests it had fallen out of use well before that date. The associated graveyard remains a recorded feature of the site. That a chapel could disappear so completely, leaving neither dressed stone nor foundation line visible above ground, is a reminder of how quickly vegetation can reclaim even substantial masonry in the west of Ireland, particularly when a site loses the community that might otherwise tend it.

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