Church (in ruins), Killeeneen More, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Killeeneen More, Co. Galway

In Killeeneen village in County Galway, a late-medieval church survives in a state that is less ruin than remnant.

Most of what once stood has either collapsed or been absorbed into its surroundings, and what remains requires some patience to read: a single side-wall here, a reconstructed gable there, and a short return of the north wall running just 3.3 metres before it gives out entirely. The west gable and that north return are so heavily colonised by ivy that the stonework beneath is largely invisible. Yet the site is not without its details, and those details repay attention.

The church was built to a rectangular plan, measuring more than 13.4 metres east to west and 8.5 metres north to south, dimensions consistent with the modest rural parish churches that were built across Connacht during the later medieval period. The only surviving architectural feature in any conventional sense is a pointed-arch doorway in the south wall, the kind of simple Gothic opening found widely in Irish churches of the period. More intriguing, perhaps, is what has been done with the dressed stones salvaged from the rest of the structure: a number of them have been reused to mark out the line of the vanished north wall and to edge the pathway at the south-west end of the church, giving the ruin a kind of skeletal outline on the ground. Against the south end of the west gable, the arch of a round-headed window survives, recorded by M. Doddy in 1988. Just south of the doorway, embedded in the ground, is what may be a baptismal font from the church itself, a liturgical object reduced to a threshold marker. Inside the footprint of the church, 23 graveslabs have been laid, dating from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth, so that the interior has quietly become a graveyard within a graveyard, the building's shell pressed into continued service long after its roof was gone.

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