Church, Tynagh, Co. Galway

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Church, Tynagh, Co. Galway

On a small hillock in the rolling pastureland at the north-eastern edge of Tynagh village in County Galway, there is nothing left to see of a church that once stood here, and yet the site is marked all the same.

A large wooden crucifix now occupies the ground where a building once rose, the sole acknowledgement of something that has entirely vanished from the surface of the land.

The story of the site's disappearance can be traced, at least in outline, through two Ordnance Survey maps separated by roughly eight decades. The 1838 edition of the OS six-inch map names the building simply as "Church" in Roman script and depicts it as a roofed rectangular structure, indicating that it was still standing, or at least still substantially intact, at the time of the survey. By the time the more detailed OS 1:2500 plan was surveyed between 1912 and 1916, the building had declined to "Church (Remains of)", its outline, measuring approximately 17 metres east to west and 9 metres north to south, rendered only as a broken line. Sometime after that second survey, even those remains disappeared. What caused the building to fall, and when exactly its last stones were removed or absorbed into the surrounding farmland, is not recorded. What remains is the faint geometry of the lost structure, preserved only in cartographic ink, and the crucifix that stands as a quiet proxy for it on the hillock today.

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Pete F
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