Eglish Church (in ruins), Meelick, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Eglish Church (in ruins), Meelick, Co. Galway

On a south-west-facing slope in the undulating grassland of Meelick, County Galway, a medieval church has all but returned to the earth.

What remains is not a ruin in the romantic sense, with arched windows framing open sky, but something far more reduced: a few short sections of mortared limestone wall and a network of grassed-over foundations that trace the ghost of a building most visitors might walk across without recognising as one.

The church was modest even in its working life, measuring roughly 12.8 metres east to west and 7.3 metres north to south, with walls about 0.8 metres thick. By the time the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded it in the nineteenth century, a description later published by O'Flanagan in 1927, the north and east walls were already described as "perfectly level with the ground." Even then, only the west end of the south wall and part of the west gable still stood to anything approaching their original height. The architectural detail was spare: a pointed doorway in the south wall and the remnants of a broken window at the top of the west gable. Pointed doorways of this kind are typical of later medieval Irish church building, and their presence here suggests the structure dates from that broad period, though no more precise date is recorded. Since that nineteenth-century account, the site has continued to diminish. Today, only three fragments of wall survive above ground: a 3.3-metre section of the south wall, the north end of the west gable reaching 1.5 metres in height, and a short stretch of the north wall. The foundations of the east gable and the eastern end of the south wall survive as low grassy ridges, legible mainly to a careful eye at the right angle of light.

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