Chapel, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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Churches & Chapels

Chapel, Noughaval, Co. Clare

In the south-east corner of a graveyard at Noughaval, Co. Clare, a small roofless chapel carries an inscription that does a good deal of biographical work for a building barely eight metres long.

Above the robbed-out doorway in the south wall, a pointed tympanum bears the letters IHS in false relief, a moulded rather than incised technique, and below that an epitaph states that the chapel was built by James Davoren of Lisdoonvarna, who died on the 31st of July 1723, aged thirty-nine. The building, then, is both a private oratory and a memorial, commissioned by or for a man who did not live especially long and whose family name is the one most closely attached to it. By 1977, Robinson's map was labelling it the O'Davoren Chapel, a designation that stuck.

The chapel was constructed in the early eighteenth century and is rectangular in plan, its walls between 74 and 85 centimetres thick. The two gables still stand to around four metres, and the north wall survives to three metres, but the west half of the south wall has been reduced to roughly half that height over the years, partly through the robbing of dressed stone for other uses, a common fate for post-medieval structures in rural Ireland. Most notably, the roof, which was originally barrel vaulted, a curved masonry ceiling of the kind found in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings, had already collapsed before 1900, as recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Westropp. The springing of the vault, the point at which the curved surface begins to rise from the wall, is still visible on the north wall, which gives some sense of what the interior once looked like. A large rectangular window in the east gable and a second, now blocked, in the south wall would have admitted reasonable light. Stone piers flanking the doorway may be what remains of a small porch. The chapel sits beside a medieval church, and roughly four metres to its south-west lie a leacht and a cross; a leacht is a low rectangular cairn-like structure associated with early Christian devotion. Around 82 metres to the north-east, the remains of what may be a round tower survive, suggesting the site has ecclesiastical layers extending well before the Davoren family built their chapel.

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