Church (in ruins), Moorfield, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
At Moorfield in County Galway, there is a ruined church that has lost almost everything except its outline.
The east and west gables still rise from the ground, along with a short section of the south side-wall, but no architectural features survive, no windows, no doorway, no carved stonework. What remains is essentially a footprint, a rectangular shell measuring roughly fourteen and a half metres long and just over seven metres wide, oriented east to west in the manner typical of Christian churches throughout medieval Ireland.
Locally the site is known as St Bannon's church, a name that preserves at least the memory of a dedication even if the figure of St Bannon himself is obscure. The church sits within the eastern sector of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of site common in Ireland from the early medieval period onward. Such enclosures, often circular or oval in plan and defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, typically surrounded a cluster of religious buildings and sometimes a cemetery, marking out consecrated ground within the wider landscape. That this church occupies only a portion of a larger enclosed complex suggests the site was once more substantial than what survives today, though the poor state of preservation makes it difficult to say much more with confidence.