Chapel, Culliaghy, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Churches & Chapels
On the northern shore of Lough Ree, just seventy metres from a quiet bay, the remains of a small chapel sit so thoroughly swallowed by vegetation that the building is now little more than a low rectangle of earth and stone banks, barely half a metre high in places.
What survives suggests two rooms divided by a remnant of wall, though no doorway is visible and the surrounding ground shows no sign of burial. It is the kind of site that rewards patience more than expectation.
The chapel was built in the 1760s as a Roman Catholic church, positioned alongside the Lanesboro to Roscommon road, which was itself only newly cut at the time, having first been laid out in 1765. The congregation used it for roughly seventy years before it was replaced by the present church in Ballyleague, which dates from 1860. By the 1830s, when the antiquarian John O'Donovan passed through and noted it, the building was already ruinous, and it appears marked in that condition on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837. Beneath the relatively recent history of the chapel lies a much older and more uncertain layer of tradition. The site is associated with St Faithlec, said to have founded a church here and also at Cloontuskert, roughly three kilometres to the north-north-east, though the sources connecting him to Culliaghy are described as obscure.
About thirty metres to the south-west of the chapel footprint sits St Faithlec's Well, a small rectangular holy well, the kind of sacred spring that remained focal points of local devotion long after the official church moved elsewhere. Defined by low masonry walls and open to the south with a small paved area in front, it is still venerated today. A stream runs southward from the well toward the lake, and a stile from the road to the north gives access to the whole site.
