Church, Inis Gé Theas, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
On the north-eastern shore of Inishkea South, a low oval sand hill holds the memory of a church that has all but returned to the ground.
By 1921, the Ordnance Survey was already marking it as a ruin; today there are no upstanding walls at all, only a partly sod-covered concentration of large stones and slabs near the northern end of the mound, which may be what remains of the structure itself. That the building has dissolved so completely into the landscape is not unusual for remote island sites, where communities were small, maintenance was difficult, and the Atlantic did its own slow work, yet the absence here is particularly complete.
The mound itself has served as a burial ground, and it is this dual function, as both sacred enclosure and cemetery, that gives the site its layered character. A cross-slab also sits on the mound, a carved marker of the kind found at early Christian sites across the west of Ireland, where a simple incised or relief cross was cut into a flat stone as a devotional or commemorative object. The 1838 Ordnance Survey recorded the church as a going concern, or at least a recognisable one; the eighty or so years between that survey and the 1921 edition were enough to reduce it to a declared ruin. Inishkea South was itself evacuated in 1934 following a tragedy in which ten fishermen drowned, and the island has been uninhabited since, which explains why no effort was made to preserve or record what remained of the building in any later period.
The mound offers clear sightlines north towards Inishkea North and south towards Duvillaun and Achill, a position that would have made the church a visible landmark from the surrounding waters. Reaching the island requires a boat crossing from the Mullet Peninsula, and landing conditions depend entirely on the weather and sea state along this exposed stretch of the Mayo coast.