Kilshanvy Church (in ruins), Kilshanvy, Co. Galway

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Kilshanvy Church (in ruins), Kilshanvy, Co. Galway

At some point between its life as a medieval place of worship and its current state of ivy-clad ruin, this small rectangular church in County Galway was pressed into service as a handball court.

The plaster applied to make the walls suitable for the game still coats much of the interior, obscuring whatever original stonework or features might otherwise be legible. It is an odd kind of palimpsest: a building that outlasted its congregation, was repurposed for sport, and is now a ruin again, sitting quietly at the roadside on the south-eastern edge of a small cluster of houses, with no trace of a graveyard to suggest it ever had one.

The church itself is a modest but reasonably well-preserved medieval structure, oriented east to west and measuring 14.3 metres in length by just over 6 metres in width. Both gables and the south wall survive to their original height, though most of the north wall has been rebuilt at some point. The east gable retains a single-light pointed window with chamfered jambs, a detail typical of later medieval ecclesiastical building in the west of Ireland, where chamfering, the cutting away of a right-angled edge to produce a bevelled surface, was a common way of finishing stonework around openings. Two further single-light windows pierce the south wall. More intriguing is a third window set at first-floor level at the west end of the south wall; taken together with beam slots visible above the west doorway, this points to a former internal loft at that end of the building. The original doorway in the south wall has been robbed of its dressed stonework, and a second doorway in the west gable, probably a later insertion, has been blocked. O'Flanagan, writing in 1927, noted the site. An old watermill stands about 100 metres to the north, near the Kilshanvy River crossing.

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