Church (in ruins), Lickmolassy, Co. Galway

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Church (in ruins), Lickmolassy, Co. Galway

On the south-facing slope of Church Hill in Lickmolassy, a small ruined church sits within a still-used graveyard, its walls so poorly preserved that the building's most telling detail is almost invisible: a blocked-up doorway in the chancel's south wall, the sole surviving architectural feature of what was once a more elaborate structure.

The ruin is not dramatic. What makes it quietly compelling is the accumulation of fragments, each displaced or half-consumed by time, that together suggest a place of considerable local importance over many centuries.

According to the Ordnance Survey Letters, a nineteenth-century set of topographical notes compiled for the Irish Ordnance Survey, the church was built on the site of the original church of St. Molaise, an early Irish saint with dedications scattered across the country. The structure visible today had at least two phases of construction, which can be read in the changes in the masonry between the nave, measuring roughly 10.7 metres by 7.6 metres, and an earlier chancel at the east end, somewhat smaller at 9 metres by 5.6 metres. Embedded in concrete in the northwest corner of the nave is a bullaun stone, a type of boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions that are found at early ecclesiastical and prehistoric sites across Ireland, and whose original function remains debated but was likely ritual or practical. Three medieval graveslabs survive within the church itself, worn and fragmentary. Elsewhere in the graveyard's south half lies a medieval holy water font, separated now from any building that once gave it context.

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