Church, Corr Chuillinn, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Corr Chuillinn, Co. Galway

On a north-facing slope at Corr Chuillinn in County Galway, somewhere among scrub and woodland, there is a site that has left almost nothing behind.

No stonework, no outline, no structural trace of any kind remains visible above ground. What survives instead is a paper trail, thin but telling: a sequence of maps that quietly chart an erasure.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, marks the location simply as "Graveyard", which most likely refers to an associated cillin burial ground, a type of informal, unconsecrated plot historically used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial. By the time the third edition of the same map was published in 1947, even that label had gone. In its place, nothing more than a small cross symbol beside the site name. The building itself is thought to have been a Roman Catholic chapel dating from the nineteenth century, a period when such modest rural chapels were common across the west of Ireland, many of them built during or shortly after the years of Catholic Emancipation. Whether this one was abandoned, demolished, or simply allowed to collapse is not recorded.

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