Church, Cloonygowan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
In a rough pasture in Cloonygowan, Co. Mayo, a sycamore tree grows out of a pile of rubble that was once the interior of a church.
The tree has rooted itself so thoroughly into the loose stone fill that it now serves as the most visible marker of a building that has otherwise nearly vanished into the ground. The walls, where they survive at all, stand no higher than half a metre on their outer face, and in several places they disappear entirely beneath dense overgrowth.
A 1969 survey by Aldridge recorded that locals still pointed to a rectangular plot, roughly nine metres by three and a half metres, alongside a fence north-west of an adjacent children's burial ground, as the site of the old church. A cillín, or children's burial ground, of the kind found across rural Ireland, typically served as a resting place for unbaptised infants who, under older Catholic practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground; the one here lies just fifteen metres to the south-east. The ruined rectangular building recorded at the church site measures approximately ten metres north to south and six metres east to west, broadly consistent with the dimensions Aldridge noted. Its eastern wall has been absorbed into, or cut across by, a later field wall running on a north-south axis, which speaks to the gradual way farmland quietly reclaims ecclesiastical ground over generations. In the south-west corner of the interior sits a bullaun stone, a roughly hewn boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface. Bullaun stones are found at early Christian sites across Ireland and are thought to have served ritual or practical functions, though their precise original use is not always certain.
The site sits in rough pasture with rising ground to the north and a farmstead immediately to the north-east. What remains is easy to overlook: low wall stumps half-buried in vegetation, a field boundary that has consumed the eastern end of the building, and that single sycamore pushing up through the rubble at the centre of it all.