Church (in ruins), Seefin, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Seefin, Co. Galway

At the western end of a Galway graveyard, a single gable wall rises to nearly five metres, which is enough to make it the most articulate remnant of what was once a complete medieval church.

The rest of the building has sunk into the pasture as low, grass-covered humps, tracing out a rectangle roughly fifteen metres long and five metres wide, but that gable holds its ground with some authority. A corbel, a projecting stone bracket built into the wall's interior face, sits centrally positioned and points, almost silently, to a loft that no longer exists. Lying in the grass outside the south-west corner, the top section of an ogee-headed window, its curved and pointed arch typical of late medieval craftsmanship, has come to rest on the ground, separated entirely from the wall it once belonged to.

The gable wall itself tells a layered story. Up to a height of about two and a quarter metres, the stonework is original, built in regular courses and distinguished by a projecting offset on the internal face, a slight ledge in the masonry that often marks a change in building phase or structural intention. Above that point the wall has been rebuilt at some later date, and dressed stone, carefully shaped rather than roughly laid, can be picked out in the upper section. Somewhere in the fabric of the surrounding graveyard wall, a stone that may once have served as the lintel over the church doorway has been quietly absorbed, reused as ordinary building material. Inside the church's grassed interior, a font survives, along with what appears to be the capstone of a double font, a less common feature in which two basins share a single stone. The site continues to serve the living as well as the dead, with a number of modern graves occupying the same interior space.

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