Eglish Abbey in ruins, Eglish, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Religious Houses

Eglish Abbey in ruins, Eglish, Co. Galway

In the walls of Eglish Abbey, blocked up and largely forgotten, a water font survives in the embrasure of what was once the main western doorway.

The doorway itself has been robbed out, the stones long since taken for other purposes, yet the font remains, embedded in the masonry like a small, stubborn fact. Nearby, a ragged gap in the east wall marks where, within living memory of an earlier generation, a fine four-light window in cut stone and pointed Gothic style still stood. That window is gone now too, leaving only the hole behind it.

The monastery at Eglish sits at the southern end of a low hill in County Galway pastureland, its earliest documentary mention dating to 1436 to 1437. Its precise religious identity is a matter of some uncertainty: it appears to have been founded as a Carmelite house, a mendicant order that established several Irish friaries during the later medieval period, though it may subsequently have passed to Franciscan use. What remains today is a partially ivy-clad rectangular church, roughly 26 metres long and 6.5 metres wide, most of whose walls still stand despite partial rebuilding and a number of gaps. To the north, a cloister garth, the open courtyard around which monastic life was organised, once measured some 20 by 13.7 metres, though little of it survives intact. The east range of the domestic buildings retains two single-light ogee-headed windows, their curved and pointed heads among the few pieces of dressed stonework still in place. A small annexe occupies the north-west corner of the cloister. Some 20 metres to the south-east stands a separate building known locally as Teampall Maol, a plain rectangular structure with a pointed arch doorway in its west wall and its windows robbed out.

The graveyard that occupies the church interior and surrounds the ruins is still in use, with modern burial vaults sitting among the old walls. Old grassed-over field boundaries extend to the south, west, and south-east of the friary, and until recently a large rectangular enclosure to the west-south-west could still be traced in the ground, though it has since been levelled during land reclamation work.

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