Church in ruins, Fahy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
At the northern end of a graveyard in Fahy, County Galway, there is a church that has completely ceased to exist above ground.
No walls, no threshold, no outline in the turf. The site is recorded, studied, and named, yet there is nothing left to see.
When surveyors working on the Ordnance Survey Letters encountered the building, probably in the 1830s, it was already far gone. They described it as a small, rough church with all its features destroyed, though enough masonry remained to suggest it was around four hundred years old, placing its origins somewhere in the late medieval period. One detail survived the general ruin long enough to be noted: the doorway had been set into the south side-wall, an arrangement that was not unusual in Irish churches of that period. That observation was later published by O'Flanagan in 1927. Since then, even those remnants have gone. The undulating grassland of the surrounding area has, in effect, reclaimed the site entirely, leaving the graveyard it once served as the only visible indication that something of significance once stood here.